Tara Beckley is escorting a professor to speak at her university when tragedy strikes. A runaway van collides with Tara’s CR-V instantly killing the professor and sending Tara careening into a nearby river. A short time later, Tara awakens to discover she is fully conscious and aware but unable to communicate with the outside world…
Well, it’s that time again. The 2019 Canada Reads competition has arrived. Comedian Ali Hassan returns as host and moderator for the third straight year after taking over from Wab Kinew in 2017. This year, the theme is “one book to move you”. With that in mind, it likely meant that you had some heavy…
Between this year’s Canada Reads books and Don Winslow’s The Border, I spent the majority of the first quarter of 2019 reading some really heavy stuff. So when I put down Lindsay Wong’s The Woo Woo last week, I perused my bookshelves for something fun and light. I settled on Lisa Lutz’ The Spellman Files,…
Twice now, Don Winslow believed he was out. After finishing 2005’s The Power of the Dog, he’d felt he said his piece on the war on drugs. Then, nearly a decade later, he sat down at a keyboard and started typing what would become his follow-up to The Power of the Dog, The Cartel. After…
OK, book three of Canada Reads 2019 down. After reading Brother, I’m becoming skeptical of the tagline for this year’s competition – “one book to move you”. It should probably be, “Canada Reads: Embrace Depression.” David Chariandy’s novel Brother is an absolutely tremendous, albeit heartbreaking read. Alternating between the past and the present, Chariandy’s book…
Pieced together with the help of a private detective, Suzanne is a fictionalized telling of the life of Suzanne Meloche (Barbeau) by her granddaughter, Anais Barbeau-Lavalette. Suzanne is the second book I’ve read of the five shortlisted for the 2019 Canada Reads competition. With the first being By Chance Alone (a memoir written by a…
Following a commercial flop with his debut novel, author Thad Beaumont begins writing violent crime stories featuring tough-guy Alexis Machine under the pseudonym George Stark. This seems to do the trick as Beaumont is massively successful. But the urge to return to his original dramatic style brings about the end of Stark. After a mock…
Where do I even begin with this one? If you could place your current consciousness back into your younger self, what would you change? Would you ask out that girl? Save a loved one from tragedy? Would you pull a Biff Tannen and amass a fortune betting on horse racing? Blake Crouch’s Recursion is a…
Every Read Thing 