What are you reading?

[Pook]

Yup- taking this thread a little OT but what the heck!
Yes each CBC Region has its particular gems- as a former GTA and then Ottawa area resident I remember Rita was she was the Ottawa morning or was it afternoon host. And Allan Neal has a sense of fun. Ed Lawrence was brilliant- we have Jim Hole who is good but not quite in the same league.
It was the long form general interest/ interview shows that I really learned to love- I remember Don Harron before Gzowski cam back from TV...The Current will be hard to replace and sorry millennials, but podcasts aren't radio.

 

[Odyssey]

I recognize and have loved those shows, and a few more. The blab blab I didn't like must have been the news, ha. I started listening to Morningside when we lived in a little farmhouse in a pretty little valley. It was perfect when we were snowbound, and when we weren't we just pretended we were. I would ski and snowshoe around and into the village for the mail and a few groceries. The plows did too good a job in winter so I'd just ignore the fact I could've driven and "saved myself the trouble". Maybe it was the times, the place, or the people, but every single vehicle that passed would slow and stop to offer assistance. "Besoins d'aide??" "Non merci, ca marche bien." And the radio was a nice connection to "the outside world." Most of it was CBC. As much as I loved Morningside's Don Harron (I had all the Charlie Farquharson books) he wasn't the interviewer Peter was. I've been a CBC listener ever since, but not having had a dependable home radio in years has meant the car radio is my sole source of radio listening most days. Thanks for that radio suggestion Frozen, I'll look into that.

Martha Grimes is perhaps the best cottage murder mystery writer there is. She puts Agatha Christie in the shade. Her Inspector Richard Jury series is fun and intriguing. The character stereotypes are amusing and the drama riveting. I have almost the complete set with only a couple books missing, but I've yet to make it past #5. I'm easily distracted to picking up other good reads while in the middle of something else. And then after I've got 3 or 4 books on the go I end up putting one of them down and...that's what happens. In this series each of the titles comes from an actual pub name in Great Britain. Her attention to detail and history is impressive, no light touch with this writer who hails from Baltimore Maryland.

 

[Guest]

Just finished The Dreamt Land; Chasing Water and Dust Across California (Mark Arax, 2019).

Sounds kinda boring and regionally specific, it was neither. Well written and engaging in a John McPhee-esque style.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41883929-the-dreamt-land

Some early water history, from Catholic missions to the gold rush to early settler agriculture, some revealing (nee scary) stuff about current agricultural practice in the otherwise dry central valleys. The nut farming stuff, especially almonds and pistachios is, well, unsustainably nuts.

Another highly recommended non-fiction. I’d put in on this year’s list of Pulitzer Finalists.

 

[Odyssey]

This week we ran out of sun. A cold rain crept in overnight to sweep away all signs there ever had been an Indian Summer once in my yard. (https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...-indian-summer) The crimson blaze of maples have been shorn and now lay littered about the ground like soggy tattered flags. I'll get busy raking them all up as soon as the rain stops, which may be some time next week. In the meantime I'll reshelve the summer reading to replace them with a more sombre choice. I came across an interesting article about the 125th anniversary of this book. (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/...ts-anniversary) Hard to imagine raising a glass to toast the Count but I will pick up the book by the celebrated Bram Stoker. It befits the gloomy melancholy days of November, when grey mists cloak the trees, a cold damp clings to our bones and night noises tap tap tap at the windows.

 

[PaddlingPitt]

Your last line, Odyssey, suggests that you might also be getting to read Poe’s ‘The Raven. Also melancholy and somber.

 

[frozentripper]

Still waiting, about halfway in the long lineup of about 150 in the library system, to read Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson by Ottawa author Mark Bourrie. The demand and interest, along with the author's name, may have been created by a CBC Ideas radio program on the explorer and the book.... archived here and worth spending an hour with in radioland.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/pierr...time-1.5166425

In the meantime reading books on Algonquin park also in the library system I never got around to borrowing, on Frank Kuiack, The Last Guide, the extremely detailed Birds of Algonquin Park (whew) by former park naturalist Ron Tozer, and another on history.

Frank Kuiack's fishing tips along with the author of the above book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbbw0jX8IIo


Radisson seeing the sights, historical painting...

 

[memaquay]

I've read Bush Runner, it was OK. Got it on Kobo, should have waited for the library loan.

 

[Guest]

Sailing True North

Anyone read it yet? I am down to #2 on the inter-library loan waitlist for Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44028643-sailing-true-north

I have high hopes given the reviews I’ve read, and have recently been on a naval history kick. Finished on the bedside table:

Peter Moore’s Endeavour, the Ship that Changed the World (2018)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36992472-endeavour

And Ian Toll’s Six Frigates, the Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (2006)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39000.Six_Frigates

 

[Odyssey]

Bram Stoker's Dracula is quite good. Interesting way of telling a story, narrated as a series of journal entries and diary notes, some newspaper articles too. In this way the reader follows the storyline from various viewpoints and perspectives. And it is subtly creepy, and not in a modern garish sort of way. I was never into gothic horror stuff but am being drawn to it. I check the windows at night to be sure they're securely locked. My wife keeps dressing gowns and shawls hanging on hooks just inside our bedroom door. At night in the twilight they appear as looming shadows just hanging there one step inside our room. I'll either have to hurry up and finish this book and move on to something less sinister, or get permission to move the dang coat hooks, or start sleeping in the spare room. Time will tell.

 

[frozentripper]

After a long wait, finally got to the front of the line at the library website, borrowed the book and started reading through Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson... lots of interesting historical side details besides those related to Radisson's life. For instance, the history of beaver hats in creating the fur trade and why they became so popular and necessary during the 1600s, the great London fire and how life in London actually was, (ie. poverty, disease and general misery for most), very different from depictions in Shakespearean movies, detailed descriptions of Iroquoian life into which Radisson was adopted, the scale of misinformation, corruption, and incompetence surrounding exploration of the New World, the love of warfare and adventure running through the European aristocracy of the times, widespread opportunism and piracy. And how the exploration of the New World could make one very rich if one made the right decisions.

The new information gathered from Radisson's recently discovered manuscript provides the book with detailed historical descriptions that weren't available previously. Author Mark Bourrie does very well covering it, together with information from many other references.. it's obviously written by someone that understands history. Well worth the wait, for new insight.

 

[Traveler]

Half way through "Beyond the Trees" by Adam Shoalts, an account of his 2017 trans-Arctic, solo canoe trip from Eagle Plains in Yukon to Baker Lake/ Hudsons Bay. Pretty good read so far - makes me wish I had 30 fewer years under my belt, and a heck of a lot more courage.

 

[alsg]

Calvin Rustrum's North American Canoe Country, with illustrations by Les Kouba (apparently the same illustrator who drew this site's mascot). Dated in some respects but a classic.

 

[Boreal Birch]

Calvin Rustrum's books were the first camping & canoeing books I read as a young boy. He was also the inspiration for Bill Mason outdoor life.

 

[Odyssey]

I am currently exploring the common ground of ecology, agricultural history and landscape archeology in one single book called A Natural History of the Hedgerow by John Wright.
https://guardianbookshop.com/a-natur...846685538.html
To fully appreciate the biodiversity these living boundaries bring to our monochromatic monocultural lives, and more fully understand the natural history of hedgerows one must first dig a little deeper into their recent past into the agricultural histories of various types of field boundaries, and then deeper still into the marks and scars left on the landscape hinting at the more distant (agri)cultural activities as far back as our Mesolithic ancestors. Over millennia we humans have hacked away at the wilder natural world so as to create the more sedentary and predictable lives domestication brings us. These boundaries and borders of ditches, dykes, fences, walls and hedgerows all serve a multitude of functions, but mostly to control the movement of members of the mammalian world, both man and beast, wild and tame. Small wonder that these edges provide a habitat particular to this rewilding realm of hawthorn and hare.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...-and-function/

 

[DanOver]

Sonia Purnell’s “A Woman of No Importance”. Amazing biography of Virginia Hall, SOE and OSS spymaster in WWII France. She survived the war and transitioned to the CIA later.

 

[Patrick Corry]

I'm a voracious reader, and one who usually reads several (or many) books at the same time. Fortunately I'm also able to put one down for weeks and then pick it up and get back into it. So, currently the list includes: Hamilton- yeah, the one that inspired the Broadway play; Seward- biography of Abe Lincoln's Secretary of State, purchaser of Alaska from the Russkies (Sewards Folly); The Island at the Center of the World- the foundation and development of the Manhattan Island colony by the Dutch West Indies Company, a fascinating read; and Endurance- the story of Ernest Shackleton's expedition to Antartica, a tale of privation and human durability unmatched!

Books I have finished recently which are appropriate to this forum? The Lonely Land, Sigurd Olsen & Freshwater Saga, Eric Morse. Both highly recommended but probably known to many of you.

 

[frozentripper]

Freshwater Saga I haven't read yet, forgot to search for it in the library system, thanks... The Lonely Land was one of the best.

Currently starting out on The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America, A Cold Welcome, Sam White... a bit of a grind esp after the hooks that Radisson Bush Runner had but will endure. The NA explorations after 1492 till about 1620 were poorly documented and hampered by a cold period (the little Ice Age) it seems. Lots of hardship and misfortune in these first forays, from the first few pages it seems the Florida natives were not all that receptive to the Spanish, plenty of slaughter and destruction.

 

[Boreal Birch]

I'm reading CANADIAN SPRING by Florance Page Jaques, she is the author of CANOE COUNTRY and SNOWSHOE COUNTRY all illustrated by her husband Francis Lee Jaques who also illustrated Sigurd F. Olson's early books.

 

[TrailBlaser]

Beyond the Trees by Adam Shoalts. I read his earlier book, Alone Against the North and enjoyed it. I am a few chapters in and liking this one too.

 

[Robin]

I'm reading CANADIAN SPRING by Florance Page Jaques, she is the author of CANOE COUNTRY and SNOWSHOE COUNTRY all illustrated by her husband Francis Lee Jaques who also illustrated Sigurd F. Olson's early books.

Thanks, I ordered Canadian Spring and Canoe Country from Abe Books, $12.65 includes shipping for the two used books.