Thought Train to Pusan

My friend and I were talking about books recently, and she said something about how a lot of the things I had been reading lately sounded very depressing. And I sometimes ask myself why I would want to read something about someone's pain and hurt, which is a question that I can't always answer, but it often boils down to the fact that the subjects surrounding this pain is usually one of importance, or perhaps despite all the sorrow there is also a piece of hope within these stories that makes you think that maybe not everything is hopeless. I would say that The Kite Runner perhaps lacks a bit of that hopefulness in some ways, but ultimately touches on some very real, very human topics which make it fall into the category of importance through it's powerful emotions and subject matter. I can't remember much about when the book first came out, but I remember when the film adaptation was in the works, and a little piece of the controversy surrounding the safety of the a...

A couple of years ago I fell in love with the music and voices from the (at that time) currently running broadway revival of The Color Purple , and I realized that while I knew about this book and the subsequent movie adaptation, I had never read nor watched it. But here it fit perfectly into the bingo square for frequently challenged or banned books, so no time like the present. I can't recall if anyone I knew had read it as a part of our high school curriculum, but I feel like if I had, I really would not have appreciated it at that time, or understood as many of the implications and still hugely important themes. The Color Purple is told through a series of letters from two sisters, Celie and Nettie, from a young age and over the course of decades. Celie begins with writing letters to God, which later turn to Nettie writing letters to Celie after the two women become separated in their lives. Celie lives a difficult life, starting in poverty and having two children from her...

I wanted to do a little more for the CBR Canada Day reads, but it just didn’t happen. So here, I thought why not cross off a CBR10 bingo square of reading a novel from my home country, but double down and make it related to the history of Canada as well: a historical fiction, but indeed related to missionary communities and tribal warfare in the early 17 th century. The great thing about our local library is that all books by Canadian authors will have a little maple leaf sticker on them so they are easy to identify. What I didn’t realize with this author, Joseph Boyden, however is that there has been some controversy and confusion as to his First Nations heritage and whether or not this is actually accurate (though he was adopted as a sibling in 2017 to an Ojibway filmmaker named Lisa Meeches). Given his focus on First Nations subject matter ( The Orenda being no different), and the winning of certain awards in this area, this raises the subject of the speaking-ov...

Earlier this year I read another one of Christina Henry's novels, The Mermaid , which is also a reimagining of a classic story or myth (in that case, of PT Barnum's infamous Feejee Mermaid). While it was a good read though not super captivating, upon looking at some of Henry's other works, I was drawn in by a series of covers for the UK versions of her various novels to date, which included this one pictured for Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook . And you know the junior-high version of myself always rears her little head to get intrigued by any and every pirate-adjacent story. Lost Boy is a reimagining of Peter Pan and serves as a new origin story of the figure of Captain Hook, told from the point of view of (you guessed it) one of Peter's "Lost Boys" named Jamie. Jamie was the first boy that Peter ever took to his island where, once you are there and involved with Peter's magic, never grow old unless you want to. After spending hundreds of se...

As you might imagine, this memoir is not a fun one to work through, but that fact doesn’t mean it is not a good or doesn’t have significance. I was drawn to reading it after just finishing a YA novel focused on sexuality in a majority Mormon community, only to see that the trailer for the film adaptation for Boy Erased just dropped. And watching it was a lot to handle at a moment where I was already emotionally compromised, but I figured it would be worth it to read the source material and see just how Garrard Conley’s story played out in his own words before being altered to suit a different medium. Boy Erased: A Memoir focuses on a brief period of time for Garrard Conley when he was 19 years old and entered into conversion therapy for his homosexuality; the son of an aspiring Baptist pastor, living in the Bible Belt of the United States, Conley is shown through flashbacks struggling with his sexuality and the negative messages he has received throughout his lif...