In March, I finished the books All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong and Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and felt satisfied with the progress through my to-be-read list. In Leipzig, the book fair took place as well, but this year it took place without me due to my lingering cold and other personal factors.
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| All Our Ordinary Stories (cover) Arsenal Pulp Press |
I also 'binged' the 2025 Canada Reads competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channel (YouTube). The friendly and attentive circle of panellists who were drawn from the books, sports, cooking, and television worlds was — as online commentators noted — less bloodthirsty (for lack of a better word) than in previous years.
Teresa Wong's book is from the Canada Reads longlist.
Besides I've read A Two-Spirit Journey — co-authored by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer, it's a memoir of the extremely difficult life of an Indigenous woman born in the province Ontario — which made it onto the shortlist.
Next up on my Canadian, independently published reading list is another shortlisted book: Dandelion, by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.
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| Dandelion (cover) Arsenal Pulp Press |
A Two-Spirit Journey was not literarily written, some commentators said. But I thought it did have a style. Listening to it in the audiobook version, I did not find it dry either: I pictured scenes, people and times in my mind, and the spiritual world of Ma-Nee Chacaby's grandmother. On the other hand, I too found that reading about the abuse that the author suffered as a child was very heavy. (All I'll say is that I'd never considered the ethical pros and cons of castration in depth before; but this book led me into that train of thought.) But in the end I'm not sure it's a sound literary criterion to tell somebody that their life is so difficult that one doesn't want to read about it.
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| A Two-Spirit Journey (cover) University of Manitoba Press |
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a lengthy look at United States immigration policy since the early 1900s. The journalist author (New Yorker) interweaves life stories of individual Latin American asylum seekers as case studies, convincingly arguing that US foreign policy missteps exacerbate problems in Latin American countries, resulting then in larger quantities of Latin Americans who flee to the southern US border.
It's stylistically a cross between an Amnesty International report and long-form magazine journalism. It's also a close portrait, in its final chapters, of a Trump administration's modus operandi when there are no 'adults in the room.'
Where do we go from here, if there is not enough public support for making sure that every asylum seeker is well cared for?
— The Hippocratic Oath probably applies as well to immigration and foreign policy matters as to medicine: First do no harm.
And I think that part of 'doing no harm' means not making refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants scapegoats for socio-economic problems that already would have existed without them.
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| Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (cover) Penguin Press |
