Leading Ladies, Lasting Legacies: celebrating the stories of women

February is African Heritage month. Last year during African Heritage month, The Reader offered readers a peek at eight great popular and awarding winning black authors that we thought you should know about. This year, the theme of African Heritage Month in Nova Scotia is "Leading Ladies, Lasting Legacies". It's a celebration of the lives and achievements of African Nova Scotian women that draws attention to 6 particular women - Edith Cromwell, Ada Fells, Geraldine White, Beryl Braithwaite, May Sheppard, and Willena Jones - who have made great contributions to their communities.

Biographies are a wonderful way to learn about history and individuals, and they are just plain great reads. So, in the spirit of this year's African Heritage Month theme, here are 8 biographies of black women that you should know about. It's a mix of classics and new titles, local and international, but all of them represent interesting lives well worth knowing about.

Invisible Shadows: a Black woman's life in Nova Scotia by Verna Thomas

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Kinky Gazpacho: life, love & Spain by Lori L. Tharps

Michelle: a biography by Liza Mundy

The Hanging of Angelique: the untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of old Montreal by Afua Cooper

In Search of Nella Larsen: a biography of the color line by George Hutchinson

Little X: growing up in the nation of Islam by Sonsyrea Tate

The Golden Road: notes on my gentrification by Caille Millner

Bible Stories

As you probably know, historical fiction has been increasingly popular for quite a few years now, garnering many new readers each year. As interest grows in historical fiction, new sub-genres arise and gain popularity in their own right.

The Bible fiction sub-genre intrigues me, given the sacred nature of the stories' frame. Authors certainly must get all their research right, both historical and biblical. They also have to try to avoid being sacrilegious, all the while providing an engaging story. Those who do it well, do it very well.

Here are some recent well received titles in the Bible-fiction sub-genre:

Angel Time: a novel, by Anne Rice

Eve: a novel of the first woman, by Elissa Elliott

Luke's Story: by faith alone, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins

Homer's Odyssey and other tales of human-animal connections

We love our pets. We LOVE our pets. We used to need them for protection, to rid our homes of vermin and for work. Now, some of this is still true, but primarily our pets are our companions. Dogs have been with us for 15,000 years and have developed to understand our body language, vocal tones and have an intense desire to please us. We have had companion cats for a mere 9500 years and I'm told that they are less intrinsically motivated to please us. Regardless, cat, dog, bunny or budgie, our pets have proven to offer us longer and healthier lives. They lower our stress, demand exercise and fresh air and, perhaps most importantly give and receive uncomplicated love.

Homer's Odyssey: a fearless feline tale, or how I learned about love and life with a blind wonder cat by Gwen Cooper is the story of a remarkable kitten. Blind, due to a nasty eye infection, appropriately named Homer, found a home with Cooper. She was at a crossroad in her young life. She was already the owner of two cats. She had recently been through a bad breakup, was not enjoying her low-pay job and did not even have an apartment of her own. Homer, having never had sight, had no sense of limitations. Homer was known to catch flies in mid-air and even warded off an intruder. This cat provided the lesson that all things in life are possible with determination and enthusiasm.

If you are familiar with Dean Koontz, you know how important his dog was to him. Pictures of him on his books included Trixie, his golden retriever. Over the years Koontz had been very generous with a group which trained service dogs, and as a thank you, he was given Trixie, a retired service dog. Unfortunately Trixie developed cancer in 2007 and had to be euthanized. He wrote A Big Little Life: a memoir of a joyful dog in her honour and a couple of books credited to Trixie including Bliss To You, by Trixie Koontz as told to Dean Koontz. The proceeds from these books were given to Canine Companions for Independence. You will be happy to know that Koontz has a new dog, Anna, who is apparently the grandniece of Trixie. Warm and fuzzy.

Not all dogs are so wonderful to live with. Marley and Me: life and love with the world's worst dog by John Grogan and Walking Ollie: or winning the love of a difficult dog by Stephen Foster tell the stories of two dogs who required alot of time and patience. Marley (who has since become further immortalized in film) was very cute and very rambunctious puppy who grew up to be destructive and disobedient, though still cute. Ollie, an abandoned puppy (think Oliver Twist) was part greyhound and was happiest offleash flying through parks and busy streets. At home Ollie was skittish and fearful. For the reader, the joy of these books is the bond which ultimately develops between the owners and their pets as they work through their issues (both canine and human.)

Moving away from the heart grabbing stories of humans and their beasts, but still a compelling story of the relationship between people and animals is Animals in Translation: using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior, by Temple Grandin. Grandin is autistic and, through her research, has noted similarities between how animals and autistic humans perceive the world. Animals process the world in terms of pictures, sounds and smells. Grandin has found this to be also true of people with autism. According to Grandin, the autistic person may not process the world in terms of linguistics and abstract thought. An interesting theory which shows we have so much to learn from our animal companions.

Our pets provide us with comfort and with inspiration. Shaggy Muses: the dogs who inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Bronte by Maureen B. Adams immortalizes the dogs of these famous writers who found solace with the animals (solace from loneliness, grief, trauma). These dogs often found their way into their novels as well. Both Virginia and Leonard Woolf were incredibly compassionate towards animals. One story goes that a bird had built a a nest upon an open door and Leonard would not allow the door to be closed until the bird was done with it. Virginia Woolf, in addition to treasuring her own dogs (Gurth, Grizzle, Pinka) wrote a book about Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, who not only helped her to cope with grief, but was also the victim of a number of dognappings. The story of Emily Bronte and her mastiff Keeper is most compelling. The pair would frequently seen traipsing the moors. Bronte was unsentimental about dogs and beat Keeper badly for an infraction and then tenderly tended his wounds. Keeper outlived his mistress and all accounts of her funeral mention this great dog. He never left her side in her final days.

I'm showing my dog bias, so I will end with another cat. Dewey: the small town library cat who touched the world by Vicki Myron tells the story of Dewey Readmore Books who was unceremoniously dropped, filthy and frozen, into a library bookdrop as a kitten. Dewey thrived with the love and attention he found within the walls of the library. The community gathered round this cat and Dewey gave it back to library users in spades. Librarian Myron tells Dewey's story along with her own troubles and shows once again how much an animal's love and loyalty can mean to our lives.

Retro Reading Suggestions - the Lost Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize started in 1968. The awards were given to the best books published in the previous calendar year. In 1971, a few significant changes occurred to the rules. The date changed to later in the year, from April to November, and the nominees would be from the current year. The award's organizers also decided to focus strictly on fiction.

The net result was that a whole host of books published in 1970 never qualified for consideration. The Man Booker Prizes have decided to redress this oversight and award the Lost Man Booker Prize. How exciting!

As 1970 was a banner year for fiction, the longlist is quite large at twenty-two. The shortlist will be whittled down to six and announced in March. We, the international reading public, will be able to vote online.

I was pleased to find that we currently have nine of the specific titles and something by all of the nominated authors in our library collection:

A Little of What You Fancy, by H.E. Bates
A Clubbable Woman, by Reginald Hill
A Domestic Animal, by Francis King
The Fire Dwellers, by Margaret Laurence
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, by Iris Murdoch
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
Fire From Heaven, by Mary Renault
A Guilty Thing Surprised, by Ruth Rendell
The Driver's Seat, by Murial Spark

The Hand Reared Boy, by Brian Aldiss
The Birds on the Trees, by Nina Bawden
A Place in England, by Melvyn Bragg
Down All the Days, by Christy Brown
Bomber, by Len Deighton
Troubles, by J.G. Farrell
The Circle, By Elaine Feinstein
The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard
I'm the King of the Castle, by Susan Hill
Out of the Shelter, by David Lodge
Fireflies, by Shiva Naipaul
Head to Toe, by Joe Orton
The Vivisector, by Patrick White

Reading Diaries and Letters

Technology and our ever-shrinking attention spans may be changing the way we keep personal records, but our desire to understand the thoughts and impressions of others is growing. Blogs have replaced diaries. Emails, texts and tweets have replaced letters. Replaced or displaced? Just when you might start to worry about the permanence of social media, there is My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts: the tweets of Roland Hedley preserved in old fashioned print for all time.

I suppose the difference is that blogs and tweets are meant for indiscriminate public consumption immediately rather than private reflection.

Collections of diaries and letters continue to be published and we continue to enjoy them. Diaries and letters tend to be open candid records of events which haven't been blurred by time and perspective. They may be accounts of significant events or the minutiae of daily life.

Periodically we are lucky to stumble upon a diary written by someone who might never have suspected that their life would be of enduring interest. Of course the classic example is Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Anne was a young girl who recorded her life during exceptional circumstances. Thomas Cairns Livingstone (Tommy's War: A First World War Diary 1913-1918) was a middle class, ordinary Glaswegian who did us the favour of recording his impressions of daily life in Glasgow in the beginning of the 20th century. A Victorian Lady's Album: Kate Shannon's Halifax and Boston Diary of 1892 is the beautifully illustrated diary of a young articulate woman living in Halifax at the end of the 19th century. A fascinating glimpse of domestic life through the eyes of a woman at the start of her unfortunately short life.

Collections of correspondence may not be as candid (or perhaps they might, depending on the author!) as diaries. What they do offer is a view of a relationship as it grows and changes over time. The Mitfords: letters between six sisters covers the correspondence of the Mitford sisters between 1925 and 2002. The sisters were highly connected, from a young age, with the political and literary world. Their politics were varied (fascist, Nazi sympathizer, communist) and their relationships often strained. The letters provide a fascinating look at 20th century history. Considering the company the Mitford sisters kept, they would certainly have expected that their letters would be published one day.

Several of the Mitford sisters were successful writers. Not surprisingly, writers make excellent correspondents. Novelist Elizabeth Bowen (Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries, 1941-1973 ) and Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie were star crossed lovers. Each married to another, they engaged in a lifelong love affair, at a distance most of the time, described in their letters and journals.


Lifelong friendships can be cultivated and maintained through correspondence as found in Selected Letters by May Sarton. Sarton pursued friendships with many other well-known 20th century writers through letters. Sarton was free with her emotions and ideas in her letters making them a welcome event for their recipients.

Oprah's Picks - where are they now? Part 2.

In December, I did a post looking back at some of the early picks in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club and what the authors whose books were chosen have been up to since. Oprah's Book Club has been running since 1996, and the current selection (Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan) is #63: that's a lot of books and a lot of authors. In my last post, I promised a continuation .... here it is!

We'll pick this post up in 2000, a year of almost exclusively American fiction picks, with one notable exception: Daughter of Fortune (Hija de la Fortuna) by Chilean author Isabel Allende. This historical novel tells the story of young woman who travels from Chile to the United States during the height of the California Gold Rush. Allende was already a well know and respected author in 2000, but in the years since her selection by Oprah, Allende's reputation as a writer has only grown. She has published both fiction and memoirs in the last few years - including My Invented Country - a memoir of her life as a Chilean living in exile. Her fiction is frequently compared to another well known South American author - Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, in part because both authors are associated with magic realism. Her most recent novel is La isla bajo el mar- another historical piece. Released in Spanish last summer, the English version Island Beneath The Sea is due in April.


In 2001, Oprah began to slow with her selections but there were a few notable picks. For Canadians, the inclusion of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance caused a big stir. Having won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award previously, the book was already well known - particularly in Commonwealth countries, but its inclusion made the author a household name in America. Although A Fine Balance had already been on bookstore shelves for 6 odd years, Mistry's follow up Family Matters, came out soon after. Mistry's most recent work is The Scream - a short story published with illustrations by Tony Urquhart.


2001 was also notable for a book that didn't become a part of Oprah's Book Club (sort of): The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Announced as a pick for the book club in the fall of 2001, Franzen's appearance on the show was canceled after he reportedly expressed concerns about the branding that comes with being an Oprah book. (In case you forget the details, here's a link to a People.com story about the whole thing.) The book was a bestseller and a National Book Award winner, and still remains in the archives of Oprah's selections, but was never discussed on the show as other titles have been. Franzen has published two books of nonfiction since, a collection of essays How to Be Alone and a memoir The Discomfort Zone (both of which seem aptly titled in light of the whole Oprah debacle). There's finally some light at the end of the tunnel for fans of Franzen's fiction: his next novel Freedom has a tentative release date for September of this year.


We'll finish this edition in 2002, the year that Oprah decided to put her book club on hiatus for awhile. In that year she picked only two books - Sula by Toni Morrison and (her second book by a Canadian author) Fall On Your Knees by Ann Marie MacDonald. MacDonald has been active in the years since, although not necessarily in terms of writing. She spent 7 years hosting the CBC television program Life and Times and now hosts The Doc Zone. Despite being busy with a TV career, MacDonald still found time to pen a second novel, 2003's The Way the Crow Flies, and has also published the play Belle Moral - a reworked version of her earlier play The Arab's Mouth. Although it's been more than a decade since the original release of Fall On Your Knees, the epic Cape Breton set novel is still much in the minds of readers. It will be debated this year on CBC's Canada Reads program.

Readalikes: Harry Bosch mysteries, by Michael Connelly

Are you a fan of mystery/suspense author Michael Connelly? His Harry Bosch series has been among the more popular series at our library for several years.

Connelly excels at creating intriguing plot lines that he fleshes out with realistic details, resulting in storylines that ring very true, which is essential for my enjoyment of any mystery novel. I guess Connelly's years as a crime reporter for the LA Times pays dividends in his ability to accurately portray crimes and the criminal mind.

His most popular series features detective Harry Bosch. Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch is a detective in the classic style, one who will stop at nothing to protect the venerable. Someone who may break a few rules when necessary to impart his sense of justice and is a loner who has his own demons that torment him. The settings of Hollywood and Los Angeles are also key ingredients in this series, providing a backdrop full of greed, sleaze and shattered dreams.

If you like Detective Harry Bosch, you might also enjoy:

Leonardo Padura - Cuban mystery series featuring Lt. Mario Conde, known as the Count on the streets of Havana. Like Bosch, Conde is a champion of hard working citizens struggling against the underworld and the justice system. If Conde had his way, he would be allowed to retire and become a novelist, but his sense of duty always draws him back. The setting of Havana is an integral element to this fine series.

John Harvey - British Inspector Charlie Resnick tackles crime and corruption in the city of Nottingham. He too has a strong sense of right and wrong and can't stop himself from shaking up the establishment. Of course, he has his own issues that seem to prevent him from ever finding peace, happiness and true love.

Jeremiah Healy - Bostonian private eye John Francis Cuddy is a Vietnam Vet who has his fair share of emotional issues. He is intensely loyal and will never turn his back on someone in need, especially those pitted against the system. As with many heroes, his dark side bubbles to the surface when he gets angry. Strong characters and complex storylines define this series.

~ more readalike suggestions can be found using NoveList.