100 books like Talking to Canadians

I loved reading this book before it became tainted by fact checkers. That being said, it remains a fascinating, raw, and gripping read. His use of language as falls deeper and deeper into becoming hooked is similar to being a storm chaser. He can’t help himself chasing the highs, knowing full well the low may be the last one. “I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.”

If there ever were… show more.

Although dipping into glamorous strata of New York society, the friendship dynamics reminded me of the period of adulthood where you start to make your way in the world… Often it involves new jobs or new cities and sometimes women discover the people they thought were close friends are not. Parallel journeys of female friends can put them into tension where paths diverge and taking space is the only solution. Here, avid reader Katey is moving beyond her humble beginnings by talent and character alone, while room-mate Eve is escaping her privilege and family ties; their agendas blend well for a while until they spin off in different directions. Resourceful Katey continually starts over in her smart, sharp-humoured style becoming ever more able to rely on herself.

This book narrates many kinds of trauma but the essay on sexual assault is worth buying the book.

A Canadian actor, director, and writer, Polley recounts her three-decade-long silence about Jian Ghomeshi, the hip, popular host of a hit CBC talk show. She moves from the ’90s to 2017, zeroing in on her flickering memories of assault, her reluctance to speak about it, her examination of that reluctance, her interrogation of other women in her situation, of lawyers, and her thoughts about it now.

It begins when she is outed on Twitter: “Wonder why Sarah Polley never spoke out about being assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi. #HerToo. She was the woman who stayed silent. Ask her.” Brilliant account of why women who are sexually abused do not speak out.

As a speaker at a conference on Howard Gardner's work on the "Nature of Intelligence," I learned that drawing what you are learning can result in eight times faster and longer retention of the information.

This inspired me to use drawing for learning. Nancy Margullies' book on using diagram drawings, to remember information, was invaluable to me.

As I trained teachers in my drawing methods across the U.S. and Canada, they reported improved student learning and retention. They suggested integrating the method into other subjects, such as drawing parts of a flower during a science lesson, which led to increased comprehension and retention.

I applied Margullies' Mind Mapping system to conference information and shared it with my drawing students, who successfully used the technique for homework and school subjects.

This is an exceptionally well-written and meaningful study that has greatly helped me understand how the national subject is conceptualized in Canada. As an immigrant to this country who became a citizen through a challenging and demoralizing process, this book has enabled me to see how some of us are framed as belonging while others are excluded from the Canadian nation. I have also learned how (above and beyond the national mythology surrounding it) multiculturalism has been deployed to boost Canada’s profile as a liberalizing nation while, at the same time, operating as a tool to control ethnic and religious minorities.  

This book is full of engaging and thoughtful essays focusing on the ways that human-animal histories have shaped so many aspects of life in Canada. From the horses on the streets of Montreal in the 19th century to more recent exploration of captive animals in Vancouver, this book presents an important range of topics that ask the reader to think differently about the histories, spaces, and species they may think they know. I also really appreciate that the University of Calgary Press has published an open access version of this book.

You’re fifteen years old, living unhappily with your feckless parents and unstable older sister in a small town in Montana. And then your family implodes: your parents are arrested for bank robbery and your sister flees to parts unknown. As troubling as the premise is, Canada becomes even darker and more ominous as young Dell Parsons travels alone to Saskatchewan to live with erstwhile family friends, but in fact enters a whole new world of intrigue and violence. Dell is a stoic character, and you desperately want to see his life take a turn for the better. What you get instead is a case study in resiliency and survival. Ford’s prose is powerful; every word counts, every sentence pulls you deeper into the story.

With As We Have Always Done, I’m taking a bit of a different direction on my recommendation theme in that a negative and harmful form of care – the ongoing forms of dispossession exercised by the colonial Canadian state that has a profound attachment to an ever-encroaching extractive economy –  is a historically specific backdrop to a positive form of care.

Simpson, a Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg author, writes about Indigenous resistance and refusal intertwined with reciprocal and consensual forms of caregiving between peoples, non-human animals, rivers, forests, soil, air, and so forth. I have learned from this not only what gets left out of mainstream public discourse but, more so, the significance of shared values being grounded in profound interdependencies between many forms of life.

I regard Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the embodiment of an empty progressive politics that is far more concerned with style over substance.

Martin Lukacs does a great job in The Trudeau Formula of outlining how Trudeau’s combination of soaring rhetoric and tepid reform on issues like economic inequality, Indigenous reconciliation, and the climate crisis works to stave off the more systemic changes needed to address these concerns in a substantive way.

Lukacs aptly demonstrates how Trudeau serves to uphold the status quo while presenting himself as an agent of transformative change.