Communities that entered into treaties assumed that the state would protect them from famine and socioeconomic catastrophe, yet in less than a decade the “protections” afforded by treaties became the means by which the state subjugated the treaty Indian population.

Remember when I made a promise to you and also myself that I would use Bookstravaganza to read lighter material than what I study in school?  Well ha-ha, fooled you!  Fooled myself, also.  Turns out when you have a thesis proposal due Monday it’s actually kind of hard to pick up a good old piece of fiction in favour of a demoralizing nonfiction book you would like to include in the proposal bibliography.

I’ve been terribly engrossed, as of late, in the research for my thesis on the subject of cultural genocide in Canada, nevertheless, James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life

Hoi hoi!

I am absolutely in disbelief that this is the fourth year of Bookstravaganza!  When I look upon my last three Decembers and the one that approaches, I realize that in my life there are only two things in common between all four of them: Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, and I find myself reading as much as I can before the clock strikes twelve on December 31st.

Bookstravaganza has been a great tradition that has really made many of my Decembers so incredibly memorable.  In 2012, I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms on a night train from Rome to Paris.  In 2013, I read White Oleander by Jane Fitch while a white blizzard cascaded in front of my window in Edmonton, and a week later found myself reading The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham on a hot beach in Playa del Carmen.  Last year, I…

A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.

If you’ve heard of Serena, I think it mostly likely might be because it is a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper that has just came out.  As excited as I am to see J-Law and B-Coo (?) reunite on the screen, I was really excited to read the book first.  Set in the 1930’s, Serena,  by Ron Rash, follows a man named Pemberton and his return to North Carolina to his logging camp, accompanied by his new wife Serena.  A fierce couple, Serena and Pemberton strive to build their timber empire, ruthless against anyone who gets in their way; meanwhile sixteen year-old Rachel Harmon struggles to raise her baby, fathered by Pemberton before his marriage to Serena.  When…

In his brief time before the crowd at Gettysburg he wove a spell that has not, yet, been broken — he called up a new nation out of the blood and trauma.

Living in Washington D.C. calls for at least one book about one of the great individuals who have walked its streets.  Since Hillary Clinton’s biography couldn’t be more massive, I went to the next best thing: a book about the Gettysburg address.

Now here’s a bit of a side story: in the first month that I had come to Washington, I went with a group of other interns I live with to the Lincoln Memorial.  It’s a bit of a hike, not really anywhere near a metro stop, and the day we went was incredibly windy, yet the memorial was still crawling with people, swarmed with tourists and a singing Mennonite group and veterans and maybe even a…

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Even though I finished this book on Thursday, I’ve been either too busy or too lazy to write the review.  Brave New World has been on my list for a terribly long time, but I’ve finally emerged from the darkness, joined most twelfth graders from around the world, and read this all-time classic.

If you’re living under the same rock I just emerged from and haven’t yet read Brave New World, then here is a rough, back-cover summary.  Written in the 30’s, Brave New World is set in the future in 632 A.F., After Ford ( or 2540 A.D.) in London.  In this world resources and reproduction are carefully controlled; the tradition of the family unit has been disposed, and instead people are created…

Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only themselves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing except their own creations. She should have warned them, but her devotion cautioned against impertinence. As long as Sir was alive it was easy to veil the truth: that they were not a family-not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all.

So I plunged right into another Toni Morrison for my second book of Bookstravaganza.  I realized I hardly ever read any authors back to back.  I’m glad I did.  A Mercy is Morrison’s ninth novel, and less famous as Beloved or Song of Solomon

My stack is ever-changing, which kind of annoys me because it only reminds me about how indecisive I am.  This picture was the original stack I had planned to read, but I kept swapping ones in and out.  To combat my indecision I have been asking my friends who are helping me with my reviews (see last post) if they’d like to also influence what I’ll be reading this month.  I’ve been sending them all this list, compiled of books from the shelves of the International Student House, and also my accessible collection on e-reader, or suggesting they lend me a book of theirs (sadly one that has to be in English as I am only unilingual.)

So far the list includes:

– Saturday by Ian McEwan

– Beloved by Toni Morrison

– A Mercy by Toni Morrison

– Divergent by Veronica Roth

– The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

–…

Earlier this month I was put to the task of picking out a baby book, in lieu of a card, for my cousin Katie’s baby shower.  She wanted me to pick a book that meant something to me when I was a child, a story I could share with her baby.  I thought this was really sweet, and it got me really excited about what book I was going to pick.

I found one of the most prized books of my childhood while visiting the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.  It’s called “Let the Celebration Begin!”  The book is about women and children trying to prepare for Hanukkah for the littlest children.  Although no words like “Holocaust” or “Nazi” or “concentration camp” are used, it is the story of survival in a concentration camp.  That first time I read it, when it was actually read to me by my teacher at…