Biography – Required Reading

Canada Reads, Canadian, Graphic Novel, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Canada Reads Along 2023: Ducks

March 21, 2023 Shay Shortt

by Kate Beaton

ISBN 9781770462892

“I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.”

Content Note: Sexual assault

Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant presents her first full-length graphic narrative in this memoir of the two years she spent working in the Alberta oil sands in order to pay off her student loans. Born and raised by the sea in Cape Breton, Beaton joined the many Atlantic Canadians seeking their fortune in the landlocked West while always longing for home. Heading first to the oil town of Fort McMurray and then into the camps of the oil companies, Beaton discovers the culture shock of being one of only a few women working in the industry. While she eventually pays off her loans in less time than it took to earn her degree, the real price is one she continues to reckon with.

Ducks makes for a somewhat grim read, dealing as it does with the double whammy of environmental devastation and sexual assault. The entire comic is drawn in greyscale, from the starkly beautiful landscapes of Cape Breton and Northern Alberta to the barren devastation of the oil sands, and even the aurora borealis and a rainbow. Beaton largely elides the first assault with four simple but effective pitch-black panels. The second time, slightly more is shown on page as she depicts herself getting up and walking away from her body while the attack takes place.

The oil town of Fort McMurray is filled with young families that were able to make a prosperous start on the largesse of the oil industry, but the town and the camps that surround it are also packed with lone men who have come from around the country to fill out the ranks. With little to do but work, the camps are a place of boredom, loneliness, isolation, and a self-reinforcing breeding ground for toxic masculinity. Drugs, alcohol abuse, and sexual harassment abound, but all are tolerated so long as they do not lead to a lost time incident that impacts the oil company. Over and over again, when Beaton finds the courage to share her story with other women, she hears one thing back: me, too.

Threaded throughout the narrative is the deep longing for home experienced by the many Atlantic Canadians forced to go west in order to find work to support their families. The camps are filled with refugees from the collapsed resource industries of Newfoundland and Cape Breton, be it mining or fishing. After experiencing constant harassment and two sexual assaults, Beaton is haunted by the idea that her own male relatives might have gone to the camps, and how the culture there would have affected them. She struggles to square this with the many moments of kindness she experiences when men from back home who know her family make a point to visit her or invite her into their homes.

Eventually Beaton succeeds in paying off her loans and saving up enough money to go home and make a proper go of her art, trying to leave the shadow of the oil sands behind. In the final panels of Ducks, she and her sister run into a man they knew at the camps while they’re out on the town with friends back home in Halifax. He speaks to them in a vulgar fashion, and when he leaves their friends are left stunned and appalled by his crass behaviour, but they are even more taken aback by the way Beaton and her sister simply accepted it as normal. And so Beaton concludes with the reminder that while you can quit the camps, you can never really leave them behind.

Ducks will be defended by Jeopardy champion Mattea Roach on Canada Reads 2023, set to air March 27-30 on CBC. The theme this year is one book to shift your perspective.

“This book is a window into so many critical conversations about the environment, about Indigenous land rights, about the student debt crisis and about gender relations. So there is an angle for every person to have their perspective shifted in some way.” -Mattea Roach

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You might also like:

Messy Roots by Laura Gao

The Outside Circle by Patti LaBoucane-Benson

Graphic Novel, LGBTQIA+, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Messy Roots

January 24, 2023January 16, 2023 Shay Shortt

by Laura Gao

ISBN 9780063067776

“People always said the skies in Texas were unparalleled. An endless canvas splattered with blues, purples, and oranges, towering mightily over miles of suburbia. But I found them suffocating. Here, I could run as far as I could and still not escape. Scream as loud as I could and still not be heard.”

Laura Gao was born in Wuhan but grew up in Texas. Although she attended weekend Chinese school and her parents had a Chinese church community, at school she was surrounded by white kids and faced with the daunting prospect of fitting in. As she quits mathletes in favour of basketball and then basketball in favour of art, she tries to figure out her place in a world where she doesn’t quite seem to fit anywhere.

Gao, who uses shey/they pronouns, began writing about their experience in response to the rise of sinophobia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing a short comic called The Wuhan I Know that later became the basis of this memoir. The outbreak was still being referred to as “Wuhan virus” and Gao was frustrated by this one-dimensional image of her home and its people. Gao blends Wuhan’s food, culture, and history with the story of her own family. Cousins and grandparents remain behind in Wuhan, while Laura’s parents strike out for America.

The tripartite cover of Messy Roots shows Wuhan, San Francisco, and Texas, the three places that have formed Gao’s identity. The story opens in January 2020, when every mention of Gao’s hometown is related to the COVID-19 pandemic and rising anti-Asian sentiment. This is an abrupt change for Gao, who is used to none of her (mostly white) American friends ever having heard of Wuhan. However, the story quickly turns to her family’s immigration to Texas when she was four, and her struggle to fit in as she learns English and chooses the English name Laura for herself—after the first lady because what could be more American?

When her family finally obtains green cards and can travel back to Wuhan for the first time when she is about ten, Gao is faced with the fact that she both does and does not fit in in the place she has been thinking of as home. Her cousins are surprised that she still speaks Wuhan dialect, but there are glaring gaps in her vocabulary as her cousins have grown up without her. Gao discovers that Wuhan is both home, and not home, leaving her a bit adrift. For her younger brother Jerry, who was born in Texas, it is a whole new world entirely.

Back in the United States, Gao enters her teenage years, bringing with it confusing feelings about boys, and the daunting prospect that she might prefer girls, just one more way she would not fit in in Texas. Many of her choices are defined by her fear of “fobby” Asians, which she is not forced to confront until she escapes to college in San Francisco. Suddenly her desire to fit in at all costs brands her a “twinkie” among her now numerous Asian peers from a variety of backgrounds. As she takes steps towards reconciling her identity, her last visit to Wuhan comes in the fall of 2019, blissfully unaware of the disaster lurking on the horizon.

Messy Roots is a timely coming-of-age graphic memoir of a queer Chinese American caught between the various aspects of their identity in the crucible of a pandemic.

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The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

Himawari House by Harmony Becker

African-American, History, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Top Picks, True Crime

10 Years of Required Reading: Best Non-Fiction

October 19, 2022October 18, 2022 Shay Shortt

When I first started planning a round up of my favourite books from a decade of blogging, I’d intended to make a Top 10 list. However, it quickly became clear that 10 was not going to be enough! So instead we’re having a week of lists, broken down by genre or category. Because I had a hard enough time choosing just five, never mind trying to rank them, the titles are listed in alphabetical order.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

ISBN 9780812993547

Between the World and Me uses the conceit of a letter to the author’s fifteen-year-old son to explore what it means to be Black in America. The scale is at once national and yet deeply personal; Ta-Nehisi Coates encompasses America in geography and history, but also speaks directly to his own child and his individual circumstances. Touching on everything from slavery, to segregation, to mass incarceration, Coates challenges orthodoxies and rejects easy answers in his pursuit of understanding. He writes with a unique combination of lyrical prose and pitiless clarity. By asking hard questions and rendering no easy answers Coates has penned an entreaty that has stayed with me for the past seven years.

Categories: African-American

Born a Crime

by Trevor Noah

ISBN 9780385689229

When Trevor Noah was born in South Africa in 1984, his existence was literally illegal, proof that his black, Xhosa mother and his white, Swiss-German father had violated the Immorality Act of 1927, one of the many laws defining the system known as apartheid. The crime carried a punishment of four to five years in prison, and mixed race children were often seized and placed in state-run orphanages. But Noah’s mother was determined and clever, and she managed to hold onto her son, refusing to flee her home country in order to raise him. But it made his childhood complicated, even after apartheid officially ended in 1994. Racial hierarchies and inequities persisted, and despite receiving a good education, his upbringing was anything but easy. In a series of essays, Born a Crime chronicles Noah’s experience growing up under apartheid and its aftermath. In addition to an interesting life, Noah also has a good sense of pacing and narrative style that make his recollections particularly illuminating. His funny but poignant memoir is excellent in either print or audio.

Categories: Memoir

The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

ISBN 9781328664082

In 1888, in one of London’s poorest, most downtrodden neighbourhoods, five women were murdered between August 31 and November 9, setting off a panic amongst Whitechapel’s residents, and an obsession in the public mind that survives to this day. The five women, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly were the victims of the killer called the Whitechapel Murderer in his time, but who would come to be known as Jack the Ripper. The killer was never caught, and while the five women were soon forgotten, their murderer became a legend, giving rise to “Ripperology,” or the study of the series of murders that took place in Whitechapel, and the ongoing quest to identify the person responsible. In The Five, historian Hallie Rubenhold places the five so-called “canonical victims” of Jack the Ripper at the centre of her narrative, focusing not on their deaths, but on the lives and social circumstances that would ultimately bring them to a common end. The Five felt neither voyeuristic or nor obsessive, two qualities that often leave me feeling slightly uncomfortable with some other true crime narratives. The substance of the work is given up to their lives, and their surrounding social circumstances, not their gruesome ends.

Categories: History, True Crime

Quiet

by Susan Cain

ISBN 9780307352149

Bookish folks, myself included, related powerfully to Susan Cain’s passionate message about the undervaluation of introversion in Western culture. The book cuts a broad swath, from outlining the rise of the extrovert ideal, to the psychological roots of introversion, to the perception of introversion in other cultures, to tips on how introverts and extroverts can work better together. Cain strips away the cultural stigma attached to introversion and examines the unique and underutilized skills of the quiet folks. I read Quiet all the way back in 2012, and never wrote a full-length review, though it appeared in my list of Top 5 Non-Fiction Reads of 2012. It has stayed with me a for so long because it provided me with a way to talk about my experiences that I had previously lacked.

Categories: Psychology

Spillover

by David Quammen

ISBN 9780393239225

Zoonoses are diseases that originate in animals, usually harboured by a reservoir—a species that chronically carries the bacteria or virus but is not sickened by it—and are transmissible to humans. When the right set of circumstances occur, a pathogen can spill over from animals to humans. Sometimes, that spillover is a dead end; the circumstances are so unique that they may never occur again. Or the virus can be transmitted to humans, but not between people: game over. But the thing that keeps virologists up at night is the pathogen spillovers that are not only virulent—highly deadly to humans—but also highly transmissible between humans once the species boundary has been breached. With the possibility of the Next Big One always looming, David Quammen takes the reader through famous outbreaks of zoonotic illnesses, with sections on Hendra, Ebola, malaria, SARS, Lyme, Nipah and HIV. I read a number of books about pandemics in the spring and summer of 2020 in an effort to better understand the experience we were all going through. If you’re only going to read one book about epidemics, this one combines multiple outbreaks into a single volume, highlights trends and commonalties, and provides a good basic understanding of the relationship between virology, ecology, and epidemiology.

Categories: Science

Canada Reads, Canadian, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Canada Reads Along 2022: Life in the City of Dirty Water

March 28, 2022April 3, 2022 Shay Shortt

Cover image for Life in the City of Dirty Water by Clayton Thomas-Muller

by Clayton Thomas-Müller

ISBN 9780735240070

“One of the mysteries of creation is how closely saving yourself and saving the world are linked. If you don’t take care of the world, you will only end up harming yourself. And if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t do the world any good. We’re all part of the world. It is an illusion to think any of us can be separate.”

Growing up as a young Indigenous man in Winnipeg, Clayton Thomas-Müller faced a rough childhood marked by intergenerational trauma, racism, and abuse. After the death of his great-grandparents, his family became disconnected from their traditional practices on their tribal lands in Jetait in northern Manitoba. His itinerant youth took Thomas-Müller from Winnipeg to northern British Columbia, with a detour through juvenile detention before landing back on the streets of Winnipeg on the cusp of adulthood. Life in the City of Dirty Water is the story of how, after all this suffering, Thomas-Müller reconnected with his heritage and became an environmental activist who has worked with organizations such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and 350.org.

Thomas-Müller is the biological son of two residential school survivors, though the men who he called father, who helped raise him, whose names he took, were not all one and the same. It is very much a history of intergenerational trauma, and his mother’s story is that of a very young woman from northern Manitoba who became pregnant as a teenager, and had to leave home to go to the city to access the services she would need to support herself and her child as she tried to complete her education. Their journey is not one of smooth sailing, but “he has my full support and permission to share his story; as his mother, that is the gift I can give him at this junction in his life,” Gail Pelletier writes in her forward to the book. Family remains an important theme throughout, both in how families support one another, and how they are fragmented by trauma.

Life in the City of Dirty Water describes Thomas-Müller’s non-linear path into the world of environmental activism, even as he remained tangled with the gangs his family was involved with, and continued to occasionally sell drugs to meet his obligations or help support his family. The latter part of the book turns frequently to Thomas-Müller’s anger at the world, and the way that anger both fueled his activism and also threatened to burn him up from the inside. Anger “consumes you even as it nourishes you” he warns, as he recounts a brutal schedule travelling across Turtle Island and around the world to fight for Indigenous rights in order to protect the environment. In these sections, he recounts both his work with environmental NGOs, and also how the Indigenous practice of the Sundance helped him heal and reconnect with his heritage despite growing up in the city.

Life in the City of Dirty Water employs a chatty and discursive style. Thomas-Müller’s narration is conversational, and his memoir has the feel of an oral tale that has been written down. I read this as an e-book but would be very curious to hear the author’s audio narration, as I have a feeling it might do the tale better service. The story is semi-chronological, but also ranges widely. He will make passing mention of an interesting fact or detail that sounds as if it could be a story in its own right, and then never return to it. There can also be a sort of whiplash to his blandly matter-of-fact narration of some extremely traumatic events, such as childhood sexual abuse, mixed in with descriptions of much more quotidian occurrences. It speaks to the extent that violence of all kinds was normal in Thomas-Müller’s early life, but also conceals a deep hurt that will not bear more interiority or closer examination.

Life in the City of Dirty Water was defended on Canada Reads 2022 by author and ecology professor Suzanne Simard, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. Simard argued that Canada faces an uncertain future grappling with the dual consequences of climate change and intergenerational trauma, two key themes of this memoir. She presented Life in the City of Dirty Water as a book that shows how we can turn anger into action at this crucial crossroads, and care for the earth by first healing ourselves. She felt that it was unique among the Canada Reads 2022 books in offering readers that path forward.

This first day of debates always moves quickly, with good portion of the time taken up by panelist introductions, book trailers, and a pep talk by the authors for their defenders. This year was no different. Often the book that is voted off first is the one that takes a few hits or draws attention and the best strategy on the first day can be to simply fly under the radar. This year’s theme is One Book to Connect Us, and host Ali Hassan’s questions focused on how the books on the table bridge the divides between us. Life in the City of Dirty Water did not come in for particular criticism, however Clayton Thomas-Müller’s memoir did stand out in that it was the only non-fiction book on the table this year, a fact that was called out by panelist Tareq Hadhad.

When the time came to vote, Malia Baker cast the first vote against Life in the City of Dirty Water. In the post-show Q&A with Ali Hassan, she pointed to the book’s multiplicity of stories and that she felt the meat of the activism narrative didn’t come until the second half. Three other books received one vote each, with Suzanne Simard voting against Washington Black, Christian Allaire voting against Scarborough, and Mark Tewksbury voting against What Strange Paradise. Citing the way the book sometimes read like a narrative resume, Tareq Hadhad cast the second vote against Life in the City of the Dirty Water, making it the first book to be eliminated from Canada Reads 2022.

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The Right to Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier

From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle

The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew

Essays, Memoir, Non-Fiction

Korean American Non-Fiction Mini Reviews

March 1, 2022February 24, 2022 Shay Shortt

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

ISBN 9780525657750

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness.”

In her memoir, musician Michelle Zauner explores how losing her mother to cancer impacted her Korean American identity, and the relationship food plays in maintaining a connection to her heritage. The daughter of an American father and a Korean mother, Zauner grew up in the United States, visiting Korea in the summer with her mother. Over a period of a few years during her twenties, Zauner loses her aunt and grandmother in Korea, and then her mother dies of cancer. With each death she feels her connection to Korea slipping away, as if it is embodied in the people rather than the place. One aunt remains, and they struggle to connect across the language barrier of Zauner’s rudimentary Korean, often turning to food as a place to connect. Because her mother never taught her to cook, Zauner makes that exploration herself, both in trying to recreate Korean comfort foods for her mother while she is dying, and then as a way to claim that space for herself after her mother is gone. Their sometimes tumultuous relationship is recontextualized by the fact that Zauner will never see her mother again, never get another good day with her. Crying in H Mart is a visceral account of the slow destruction of cancer, about what death takes from us, and what it gives back. Love, family, grief, and food twine together in this exploration of identity and loss.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir

Minor Feelings

by Cathy Park Hong

ISBN 9781984820365

“Minor feelings are not often featured in contemporary American literature because these emotions do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination.”

Minor Feelings is a series of essays about the intersection of art and Asian American identity that encompasses both history lessons and art theory and analysis, as well as stories from the author’s life. Cathy Hong Park is a Korean American poet who studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the early 2000s, where writing about her heritage was dismissed as “identitarian” or “ethnicky.” The titular concept and the one that gained so much traction for this collection is “minor feelings,” which she defines as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality questioned or dismissed.” For readers, this concept is a valuable lens through which to examine which types of stories about minorities we tend to laud, and which are dismissed because the emotions they contain are unpleasant or uncomfortable, or do not result in triumph and overcoming affliction. “Rather than using racial trauma as a dramatic stage for individual growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place,” she explains. Cathy Hong Park also explores what it means to speak or write with “bad” English, and what impact the tacit decision not to speak or write about her rape and murder has had on the legacy of artist and novelist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Minor Feelings is a broad and sprawling collection that covers vast ground while exploring the question of what it means for Asian Americans to create art in a system that is designed to cater to the white experience.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Essays

All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

“I never had a name for what was happening. I had never heard of or read about any racism other than the kind that outright destroys your life and blots out your physical existence.”

Nicole Chung was prematurely born in 1980s Seattle to struggling Korean immigrant parents who already had two other daughters at home. Told that her biological parents were unable to afford the medical care she needed, or provide for a child who might be sick all her life, they placed her for adoption. She was raised in small town southern Oregon by white parents who touted a colour-blind philosophy, and were ill-equipped to help a lone Asian child navigate what her race meant in a town where almost no one else looked like her. Writing clearly and eloquently about her own experiences, adoptee Nicole Chung describes the mythologizing of the adoption narrative, and how this comforting, pre-packaged story ultimately backfired as she struggled to find her identity. But if the adoption narrative proved to be oversimplified, so too was the stereotypical reunion story of a biological family lost and then joyfully found. Reaching out to her biological relations proved to be just as complex as navigating the intricacies of interracial adoption. In this exploration, Chung excels at taking the adoption narrative beyond “good” or “bad,” instead seeking to portray the institution that created her family in all the complexity that neat narratives seek to oversimplify. Her story refuses to be so constrained.

Read my full review from 2018

Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir

Memoir, Non-Fiction

Beautiful Country

January 18, 2022December 22, 2021 Shay Shortt

by Qian Julie Wang

ISBN 9780385547246

“From then on, there was no saving me. I lived and breathed books. Where else could I fund such a steady supply of friends, comforts, and worlds, all free for the taking? And so portable, too–everywhere I went, there they were: on the subway, at recess, on the steps outside of Ba Ba’s office. Unlike my teachers and classmates, they were reliable.”

In Chinese, America is known as Mei Guo, or the beautiful country. When Qian Julie Wang was only five years old, her father left for America and she did not see him for two years. Although the book is set almost entirely in North America, Wang’s memoir is in many ways about the intergenerational trauma of the Cultural Revolution, which shaped her parents’ choice to eventually leave China for an uncertain life as undocumented immigrants in the United States. Where once her father had taught English literature, and her mother had taught math, in America they were reduced to surviving on a variety of menial jobs from hair salons to piecework sweatshops to sushi factories. Wang arrived in New York City at the age of seven in 1994, and would not become an American citizen until 2016. Beautiful Country tells the story of some of the intervening years, covering elementary school and her first year of middle school before taking an unexpected twist that I won’t spoil here.

Wang is vague on the details of what exactly happened to her father’s visa, which does seem to have initially been a working visa, but she and her mother came as visitors and overstayed. Such details were immaterial to a very young child in any case. In America, Wang’s parents ruthlessly hammer home two crucial lessons. First, avoid the authorities at all costs. This leads them to mistrust what little support is available to them as undocumented immigrants, even when they could desperately use the food or other services. Free school lunch is one of the few forms of assistance they deem it safe to accept since they have already exposed themselves to some extent by enrolling their daughter in school. Second, Wang is taught to say that she was born in America, and has always lived there, a fiction which is initially undermined by the fact that she arrives in her second grade classroom largely unable to speak English. Unwilling to rely on the whims of the classmate reluctantly roped into translating for her, Wang begins teaching herself English with the help of PBS Kids. She also finds the first place that feels like home in her new country in the form of the Chatham Square branch of the New York Public Library.

Beautiful Country also chronicles the Wangs’ fraught search for some sense of community or support in their new home. Used to being considered intellectuals, the Wangs find that in New York’s largely Cantonese immigrant community, speaking Mandarin leads to the assumption that they are “farmers from Fuzhou.” Wang’s parents had two couples with whom they were close friends in New York, but were fond of saying that they were not the type of people they would have chosen to associate with back home. They were friendships of necessity. Still more disturbing is the account of a lonely older white man they call Lao Jim who uses his money to buy the time and attention of Asian women at the salon where Wang’s mother worked one of many jobs. He takes the Wangs to McDonalds every weekend, and teaches Wang’s mother how to drive, but the relationship is always tinged with the ominous warning given by one of his other girls, Mimi. “You know he’s disgusting, right?” She warns. “He’s filthy. He has nasty thoughts about everyone. Even…her.” The outings do not stop, but Wang’s father always makes sure to accompany them.

Throughout, Beautiful Country is filled with the palpable anxiety of deportation, lurking around every corner. “Only later, after living many years in fear, would I understand that the risks were much lower than we believed at the time,” Wang explains. “But in the vacuum of anxiety that was undocumented life, fear was gaseous: it expanded to fill our entire world until it was all we could breathe.” The other pervasive feeling painstakingly described is going hungry. “Hunger was a constant, reliable friend in Mei Guo,” Wang recounts. “She came second only to loneliness. Hunger slept only when I did, and sometimes not even then.” Especially early in the book, Wang’s writing has a close, child-like perspective. But undocumented life in America forces her to grow up fast, becoming a source of both practical and emotional support to her parents, particularly her mother. Her experience becomes more contextualized, and I fell deeper into her perspective, only to be surprised when the book ended at sixth grade. We do not get to follow Wang’s winding journey to citizenship, but perhaps another memoir will be in her future. For now, Beautiful Country is an evocative portrait of those first five years of struggle to realize the promise of Mei Guo.

—

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The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman

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Canadian, Essays, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Science, Top Picks

Top 5 Non-Fiction 2021

December 28, 2021November 28, 2021 Shay Shortt

My reading this year leaned heavily towards fiction but I’ve still got some great non-fiction picks for you. These are my favourite non-fiction titles read or reviewed–not necessarily published–in 2021. See the previous post for my top five fiction reads of the year!

Burnout

by Emily and Amelia Nagoski

ISBN 9781984817068

Burnout is an examination of both stressors and the stress cycle, as well as the cultural conditions that contribute to the stress and burnout experienced by women in particular. The first section of the book focuses on the key distinction between stress and stressors, and the separate techniques needed for dealing with each. Parts two and three delve into underlying causes. Burnout is about what happens when the instinct for self-preservation does battle with the deeply ingrained cultural message that caring for oneself is indulgent or selfish. The Nagoski sisters specifically look at the messages aimed at women, but many of the insights would be applicable to other marginalized identities as well. The book is written in an accessible even somewhat conversational style, and acknowledges the baggage that comes with words and concepts like “The Patriarchy (ugh)” that make these systemic issues difficult to talk about. This may be unpopular with some readers who prefer a more serious scientific tone, but this lighter touch will be key to the book’s approachability for others.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Science

Facing the Mountain

by Daniel James Brown

ISBN 9780525557418

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans changed forever. Prominent first generation Japanese immigrants were arrested on pre-emptive suspicion of disloyalty. At the same time, many of their sons were trying to volunteer for military service, only to discover they were barred from enlisting as “enemy aliens” despite their American citizenship. The ban would hold until 1943, at which point they became subject to the draft, even as many of them were living in concentration camps following their exclusion from the West Coast under Executive Order 9066. Daniel James Brown, author of The Boys in the Boat, follows the exploits of the 442^nd Regimental Combat Unit, a segregated unit set up specifically for Japanese American soldiers. Fighting in the European theatre of World War II, the unit served with distinction, taking heavy casualties, and becoming the most decorated unit in the American military. In Facing the Mountain Brown predominantly focuses on three men—Kats Miho, Rudy Tokiwa, and Fred Shiosaki—who volunteered for military service, although two older Japanese American chaplains also play a prominent role, as does conscientious objector Gordon Hirabayashi. Sifting through the Densho archives, as well as many more sources such as letters provided by the family of Chaplain Hiro Higuchi, Brown has woven together strands of personal stories that come together to shed light on a vast and complicated chapter in American history. He succeeds in bringing to life the personalities of his primary subjects, while also maintaining a view of the wider historical context in which their stories took place.

Tags: Non-Fiction, History

Gmorning, Gnight!

by Lin-Manuel Miranda and illustrated by Jonny Sun

ISBN 9781984854278

The contents of this book started life as a series of good morning and good night tweets by playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) from about 2016 to 2018. They are something between poetry and affirmation; little nuggets of encouragement and inspiration, or even commiseration. The book’s subtitle describes them as pep talks, which is apt. This little book gathers them together into a collection illustrated by artist Jonny Sun with black and white line drawings on facing pages. In the midst of a long, crappy year, my best friend and I began trading these back and forth via text message on many days, a little spot of brightness and connection in the endless drag of the pandemic. This ritual proved to be a lovely little lift to the spirits when I needed it most, so this book holds a special place in my heart this year.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Poetry

Tiny Beautiful Things

by Cheryl Strayed

ISBN 9780307949325

Before she became famous for her 2012 memoir Wild, Cheryl Strayed anonymously wrote an advice column for The Rumpus for two years under the pseudonym Sugar, where she answered letters from people seeking guidance about life and love. Tiny Beautiful Things collects readers’ favourite Dear Sugar columns, as well as a number of original letters. This collection is an intimate illustration of how someone sharing the particular tragedies of their life can be surprisingly generalizable. Strayed’s deeply empathetic replies to her readers about their dilemmas dovetail with stories about her own life, including lose her mother early, her struggle with drug addiction, and her complicated relationship with her father. This book is nearly a decade old now, and I’ve read it perhaps three times in that span, though I was never a Dear Sugar reader in its digital incarnation despite being a fan of the advice column genre. Strayed is funny, compassionate, and honest, and her writing is both beautiful and compelling. In a year full of comfort reads this was lovely to return to once more.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Essays

Two Trees Make a Forest

by Jessica J. Lee

ISBN 9781646220007

Jessica J. Lee grew up in Ontario, a biracial child more connected to her father’s large Welsh-Canadian family than her mother’s side of the family tree, which hailed from China via Taiwan. She knew only her maternal grandparents, Po and Gong. For most of her life she was unbothered by this, however, as she grew older she developed an “inarticulate longing” for both her family history, and the island from which they had come to Canada. Her grandfather was lost to Alzheimer’s disease, and her grandmother spoke rarely of the past before her death, leaving Lee to take her own journey to Taiwan with her mother in order to reconnect with her family history. In revisiting the scenes of her mother’s childhood, as well as hiking and biking through the forests and marshes of the island, Lee explores the importance of place to our understanding of self. As an environmental historian, Lee is concerned with the physical island of Taiwan, with its geography, flora and fauna, in addition to its anthropological history and personal connection. Her book is memoir meets family history meets travelogue. Two Trees Make a Forest is a memoir about the vast complexities of identity, and Lee does a beautiful job of articulating the nuances. Her family are settlers in Canada, and she is simultaneously grappling with the fact that her family is part of a long history of Chinese colonialism in Taiwan. Lee blends history, geography, language and family legacy in a meditative account of what it means to be caught between worlds.

Tags: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Canadian

What were your favourite non-fiction reads of 2021? Anything you’d like to recommend?

Canada Reads, Canadian, Memoir, Non-Fiction, Science

Canada Reads Along 2021: Two Trees Make a Forest

March 8, 2021April 3, 2022 Shay Shortt

by Jessica J. Lee

ISBN 9781646220007

“I find in the cedar forest a place where the old trees can span all our stories, where three human generations seem small. The forest stands despite us.”

As an environmental historian, Lee is concerned with the physical island of Taiwan, with its geography, flora and fauna, in addition to its anthropological history and personal connection. Her book is memoir meets family history meets travelogue. On her first trip to Taiwan as an adult, Lee writes, “I moved from the human timescale of my family’s history through green and unfurling dendrological time, to that which far exceeds the scope of my understanding: the deep and fathomless span of geological time.” In trying to understand her family’s past, she also traces the island’s history of colonization, first being claimed by China in the late 1600s, roughly contemporary with the arrival of Western explorers, and briefly passing into Japanese hands for a generation, before becoming the home of China’s exiled nationalist government.

Lee’s trip to Taiwan came after efforts to satisfy her longing through reading were mixed at best, and alienating at worst, being a by-product of the island’s long history of colonialism. She found that many English accounts of the island were written by nineteenth-century British geographers, and “these portrayals mingled beauty with fear, with curiosity and exoticism, occasionally with disgust. Though written in English, I struggled to find in them a language I could share.” Mapmaking was similarly fraught by the cataloguing efforts of both Chinese and Japanese colonial administrators steadily pushing the island’s indigenous people deeper into the mountains.

Language is also a theme that runs through the book, as Lee tries to reclaim some of the native tongue that has been lost to her. As a white-passing woman in Taiwan, she is asked why her Mandarin is so good, but if she reveals that her mother is from Taiwan, then she is asked why it is so bad. Language is a crucial barrier between herself and her family’s past. An important letter left by her grandfather upon his death must be entrusted to translators, and her mother’s annotations. Through her descriptions, Lee is able to convey how the language was both part of her, and not. When her mother taught her the Mandarin names for Taiwan’s plant life while they were hiking through the mountainous forests, Lee “found in them a longing to remember the things I had not known.” In a note at the beginning of the text, Lee explains the difficulties in something as seemingly simple as rendering Chinese and Taiwanese place names into roman letters; Lee was taught Hanyu Pinyin, while her elders prefer to use Wade-Giles, and she had to grapple with both systems to write her account in English.

Two Trees Make a Forest is a memoir about the vast complexities of identity, and Lee does a beautiful job of articulating the nuances. Her family are settlers in Canada, and she is simultaneously grappling with the fact that her family is part of a long history of Chinese colonialism in Taiwan. Her own grandparents only arrived there as rival governments were tearing China apart in the aftermath of the country’s revolution. “My mother, sister, and I stumbled over whether to call ourselves Chinese—we weren’t from a China that existed any longer—or Taiwanese. No single word can contain the movement that carried our story across waters, across continents,” Lee explains. “Political migrants. Exiles. Colonists. Diaspora. The past has many words for my grandparents’ generations, all of them containing a grain of truth.”

At the same time, her family was also on the receiving end of imperialism; her grandmother was living in Nanjing during the horrific Japanese invasion that is sometimes called the Rape of Nanking. “She never spoke of what happened in Nanjing. But I gleaned its seriousness at a young age through her unwillingness to set foot in a Japanese car or the ways she would suck her teeth in frustrated response to Japanese electronics,” Lee explains of her explosively difficult grandmother, known affectionately as Po.

In her memoir, Lee blends history, geography, language and family legacy in a meditative account of what it means to be caught between worlds: “I belong in a forest in a much bigger, colder country. I am not built for heat any more than my mother was built for winter. I speak in broken tones, making half sense to everyone I meet in Taiwan. My worlds exist in halves.” The liminality of her account is an inherent part of its beauty, and her unique perspective.

Two Trees Make a Forest was defended on Canada Reads 2021 by singer-songwriter Scott Helman. In his opening argument, Helman touted the book for its intersection of humanity and environmentalism, using the specificity of Lee’s family history to address the universal theme of finding our place in the world. His was the only non-fiction book at the table this year, and drew some early fire from other panelists. Day One of the program is full of panelist introductions, book trailers, opening statements, and author spotlights, with only a little bit of room for debate. Often the best thing a book can hope for is to fly low and avoid initial notice, something over which the defender has little control.

This year’s Canada Reads theme is “one book to transport us,” and the opening debate focused on how well the books did that at this moment, in the midst of a pandemic. No less than three of the panelists called out Two Trees Make a Forest as the book that did not work for them in this regard, with Rosey Edeh citing the non-linear structure, Roger Mooking pointing to the distraction of the environmental descriptions, and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee arguing that the book was overambitious. Helman’s rebuttal suggested that this is a book that calls for the reader to take a moment, a breath, and appreciate the Earth, and how the stories of our lives and the Earth are intertwined. He encouraged readers to make room for that.

When the time all too quickly came to cast the first round of ballots, Scott Helman and Devery Jacobs voted against The Midnight Bargain, while the other three panelists cast their votes to make Two Trees Make a Forest the first book to be eliminated from Canada Reads 2021.

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Check out these past Canada Reads contenders:

Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto

The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong