Amy Kay
Hooked on Books
Canada Reads is an annual ‘battle of the books’ competition organized and broadcast by Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC.
The goal of the program is to get people listening, watching and of course, reading. Five titles are selected for the ‘literary Survivor’ style show, and each book is championed by a celebrity panelist. The debates are broadcast over a series of programs from March 27 – 30. The panelists vote to eliminate one title each day, until a single title is chosen as the book the whole country should read. This year’s theme is ‘One Book to Shift Your Perspective’. These five books have been chosen to broaden our horizons, expand our worldview and think differently about the world around us and our place in it.
Ducks by Kate Beaton
With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.
Greenwood by Michael Christie
From the award-winning author of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah
It’s 1986, and Muna Heddad is in a bind. She and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind civil war Lebanon. She planned to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator. Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets as she struggles to overcome the challenges of immigration.
Mexican Gothic bySilvia Moreno-Garcia
The acclaimed author of Gods of Jade and Shadow returns with a darkly enchanting reimagining of Gothic fantasy set in glamourous 1950s Mexico. A beautiful isolated mansion. A chillingly charismatic aristocrat. And a brave socialite drawn to expose their treacherous secrets. Kirkus reviews calls it “a terrifying twist on classic gothic horror”.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandell
A famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time-from the actor’s early days as a film star to 15 years in the future, when his theatre troupe roams the wasteland of what remains-this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect people.
All of these titles can be reserved at your local County of Lennox and Addington Library or online at www.countylibrary.ca.