• Books Read

    Yes, Chef

    Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson Published: 2012 Narrated by: Marcus Samuelsson Length: 11:47 (319 pages) I really enjoy food-related writing and have started to dip my toe into chef memoirs these last couple of years. I love reading about what inspires people to take up cooking, what their first experiences are like, what foods and meals they remember from their childhoods, and what drives them to continue learning. I didn’t think I knew Marcus Samuelsson going into this, who apparently appears on American Food Network shows, but I realized once I started I have seen his restaurant, Red Rooster, featured on a couple of shows. My main reason for picking…

  • Books Read

    Jupiter’s Travels

    Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon Published: 1978 Narrated by: Rupert Degas, Ted Simon Length: 16:51 (447 pages) As I mentioned in my October wrap-up, I’m a new motorcycle rider! After getting my license, my immediate thought was to read or listen to something related to the topic. I knew of Ted Simon from Long Way Round, the motorcycle travelogue book and television series from Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, so he was my first thought. He’s been inspiring motorcycle tours since this came out, so it seemed like a great place to start. Ted Simon is one of the earlier pioneers of motorcycle adventuring. I was expecting him to have…

  • Books Read

    Property Values

    Property Values by Charles Demers Published: 2018 Length: 176 pages This takes place mainly in Vancouver, and I don’t often read novels that are set anywhere near me, so this was a treat in that regard. I was excited to see that the first chapter took place in my hometown, Kamloops. I think the only other time I’ve seen it mentioned in a book was in the introduction to The Best of Robert Service, as he lived there briefly. The characters described the town as redneck buttfuck nowhere, which I think is fair. Scott Clark has broken up with his girlfriend and is currently living alone in the house they…

  • Books Read

    Sailing Alone Around the World

    Sailing Alone around the World by Joshua Slocum Published: 1900 Narrated by: Bernard Mayes Length: 07:25 (273 pages) I was looking for a non-fiction adventure read after Pirate Hunters earlier in the year, and I came across this. It’s the memoir of Joshua Slocum, the first man to solo circumnavigate the globe by boat. And he’s Canadian! I didn’t pay much attention in my young school days, but I don’t remember ever hearing about him before reading this. During the entire book, I was thinking that it was amazing more people hadn’t heard of him, particularly in Canada, but then I realized that it’s very possibly just me. After a…

  • Books Read

    And Then There Were None

    And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie Published: 1939 Narrated by: Dan Stevens Length: 06:01 (264 pages) Despite loving detective fiction, I only read my first Agatha Christie novel earlier this year – Murder on the Orient Express, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I remember discussing, but not reading, And Then There Were None in a detective fiction course I took at university, so I thought it would be a great next step. We did watch the 1945 film adaptation in class, which was entertaining, but I can’t really remember too much from it. I think it played out slightly differently from the book. I just recently saw that the…

  • Books Read

    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

    Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel Published: 2018 Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart Length: 03:54 (160 pages) I love books on books. I’m always looking for more to read, and I really enjoyed this one. It’s less about specific titles as it is about a life surrounded by books. Alberto Manguel moved from a large home in France to a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment and had to deal with his home library of 35,000 books – deciding which to bring, which to store, and which to discard. The title is a play on Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library (which I have yet to read) and the…

  • Books Read

    Himself

    Himself by Jess Kidd Published: 2017 Narrated by: Aiden Kelly Length: 09:47 (384 pages) This is a 1970s small-town murder mystery with a touch of the supernatural. A man named Mahony is travelling back to his hometown, the small (fictional?) Irish village of Mulderrig, to discover why he was left in an orphanage as an infant. When he arrives, he quickly discovers from a letter that he was taken from his mother under seemingly nefarious circumstances and is warned not to trust anyone in town. It’s a book that pulls from a lot of genres. There’s the main detective plotline, a comedic small-town slice of life aspect, an underlying supernatural…

  • Books Read

    Fifteen Dogs

    Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis Published: 2015 Series: Quincunx #2 Length: 171 pages This is the first book I read for this year’s CanBook Challenge. I finished it at the end of July, which shows just how behind I am on this whole blogging thing. My interest in this was piqued when I heard of it won the 2017 Canada Reads competition, but I’ve never been a huge fan of anthropomorphic animals as a literary device. Maybe I’m still reeling from the trauma of watching Homeward Bound as a kid, but animals as main characters is not something that makes me want to pick up a book. Lee-Ann bought this…

  • Books Read

    Whisky Galore

    Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie Published: 1947 Narrated by: David Rintoul Length: 09:30 (304 pages) I love whisky, and I’ve been making an effort to incorporate more Scottish literature into my reading, so that was really all I really needed to pick this classic up. This is based on a real event during the Second World War. A cargo ship, the SS Politician, ran aground off the coast of the island of Eriskay with twenty-eight thousand cases of malt whisky and a very large sum of money on board, which was partially looted by the island’s residents. This novel takes place on two fictional islands, Great Todday and Little Todday,…

  • Books Read

    Portuguese Irregular Verbs

    Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith Published: 2006 Series: Portuguese Irregular Verbs Length: 128 pages This is a novella I picked up at the local charity book sale this year, and it’s essentially a series of short stories featuring the insufferable Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a language professor in Germany whose 1200 page magnum opus Portuguese Irregular Verbs was given the following review: “There is nothing more to be said on this subject. Nothing.” Each story features him with his various acquaintances as they as they stumble through increasingly absurd situations. The structure immediately brought to mind Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog),…