April showers don’t only mean May flowers – they also mean time inside with a good book. Fortunately, Chris Hall from McNally Robinson Booksellers returned to the Classic 107 studios for the April edition of ‘What to Read’!
Small Ceremonies by Kyle Edwards
The debut novel from the Ebb and Flow First Nation writer tells the story of two friends, Tomahawk Shields (aka Tommy) and Clinton Whiteway, growing up in Winnipeg’s North End. The pair play for the Tigers, their school’s hockey team. The team performs so poorly that the league wants them out, and the team’s goal for the season becomes staving off their demise.
“It’s a novel full of voices, family members and friends of the boys, other people who are just on the periphery of their lives, but they all get kind of their moment,” says Hall. “It’s also full of humour, but it’s really about what it’s like to be young and Indigenous in our country and in, literally, our city.”
The Audition by Katie Kitamura
“She’s one of the more exciting authors these days,” says Hall of Kitamura. “When a new novel is announced, there’s a lot of buzz and a lot of buzz amongst a whole lot of different kinds of readers.”
Kitamura’s latest novel centres around an elegant, accomplished actress who meets a much a younger man for lunch. From there, the action and plot of the book get decidedly complicated.
“There’s two narratives going on that kind of compete with one another,” explains Hall, “but they both seem to be from her. So, the questions of like, ‘Are they different sides of her? Is she kind of having an internal argument with herself?’ It’s really well done, and it really challenges our sense of ourselves.”
Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet
As the title suggests, the latest novel by the French author is far from a straightforward tale. “Is it one perspective? Is it several?” jokes Hall with a smile. “He’s already playing games right from the outset.”
Perspective(s) takes readers to the Renaissance in Florence on New Year’s Day, 1557. An artist is discovered murdered in the church where he is working on his frescoes, and an investigation reveals an obscene painting implicating the oldest daughter of the Medici patriarch who ruled the city.
“It’s a very playful novel,” says Hall, noting that historical novels lend themselves particularly well to shifts in perspective.
“They’re being written in a different time,” he explains. “If they are being written today, they are, in some ways, a contemporary novel. You wouldn’t have read a novel set in Florence literally written in Florence.”
Hope Dies Last by Alan Wiseman
While books on the climate crisis are never the sunniest of reads, Wiseman’s journalistic exploration shares stories of optimism and resilience that he’s seen in over a decade of travelling the world. Those travels took him to the places where the effects of climate change are felt the strongest, from the revived wetlands of Iraq to the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, and that’s where Wiseman encountered the people who are confronting climate change head on.
“Something that connects them is their refusal to accept defeat,” Hall says of the characters Wiseman introduces. “They battle a problem that might be our undoing, and they hold onto their hope despite that facts as they see them staring them in the face.”
“These books are unsettling. They make us uncomfortable,” says Hall, “but I think it’s important if... you think it’s happening, we should probably start to think about and start doing something.”
Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
A multi-disciplinary Indigenous artist and scholar, Simpson has previously explored water in an album called Theory of Ice. “She’s one of the most compelling voices coming from the Indigenous community,” acknowledges Hall. “Super smart, but in a way that brings so many things together. She’s always exploring the intersections between politics and story and song, community, nature, and of course, human beings.”
Theory of Water was inspired by Simpson’s love of skiing beside a creek near her house. The exercise made her think about what listening to the various forms of water she came in contact with through that activity could mean. This led to a study of interactions that Indigenous people have had with water on an historical and cultural level.
“She can be a challenging read, but that’s, I think, mainly because she’s offering a whole new way of thinking, one that starts from the assumption that everything in the world is interconnected rather than separate.”
Classic 107 listeners can hear Chris Hall’s selections for ‘What to Read’ on the first Friday of every month at around 8:30 a.m. on Morning Light.