Tag: Green Grass Running Water

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Five modern classics by Canadian authors

It’s July! When I think of July, I think of two things, Canada Day (because I’m Canadian) and Disability Pride Month.

For this month, I’ll be sharing a book lists both about Canada and about Disability Justice.

Canada has a decent history of supporting local artists.

As far back as the 1930’s, the regulators placed a limit on the amount of foreign programs allowed to be broadcasted. Currently all broadcasters (i.e., radio and TV) must produce and broadcast a certain percentage of Canadian content.

Canada also has many Canadian-specific awards, such as the Junos for music and the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award for Canadian books.

Also, the Canadian Council for the Arts provides opportunities, funding, and other initiatives to support artists across Canada.

I’m sure that the funding and opportunities haven’t always been so inclusive and inviting. But I love to see our government supporting artists, especially artists from all walks of life and all ethnicities.

Living next to the USA, Canadians often get grouped together with Americans. Sometimes it can feel like we get overshadowed by Americans, that’s why we like to specifically focus on Canadians.

In honour of Canada Day, I wanted to share some modern classics from Canadian authors.

Photo by Ali Tawfiq on Unsplash

Five modern classics by Canadian authors

Here’s a list of five books considered modern classics from Canadian authors.

  1. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (1970)
  2. The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993)
  3. Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King (1993)
  4. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen (2006)
  5. Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese (2012)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve listed them in order of when they were published.

Fifth Business (1970)

by Robertson Davies

  • Year Published: 1970
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, historical, reflective, slow-paced
  • First installment of the Deptford Trilogy

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man’s land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

Links:

The Stone Diaries (1993)

by Carol Shields

  • Year Published: 1993
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, historical, literary, reflective, slow-paced
  • Won the 1993 Governor General’s Award for English language fiction in Canada and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States (Shields is an American-born Canadian, this is the only novel to ever win both awards)
  • Also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize

The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman’s story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between. Daisy’s struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.

Links:

Green Grass, Running Water (1993)

by Thomas King

  • Year Published: 1993
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, fantasy, magical realism, adventurous, funny, reflective, medium-paced
  • Finalist for the 1993 Governor General’s Award in Fiction

Strong, Sassy women and hard-luck hardheaded men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by Cherokee author Thomas King. Alberta is a university professor who would like to trade her two boyfriends for a baby but no husband; Lionel is forty and still sells televisions for a patronizing boss; Eli and his log cabin stand in the way of a profitable dam project. These three–and others–are coming to the Blackfoot reservation for the Sun Dance and there they will encounter four Indian elders and their companion, the trickster Coyote–and nothing in the small town of Blossom will be the same again…

Links:

Book of Longing (2006)

by Leonard Cohen

  • Year Published: 2006
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, music, poetry, emotional, reflective, slow-paced

A limited edition, one-time printing of Leonard Cohen’s best and most iconic book of poems

“Book of Longing has exceptional range. It is clear yet steamy, cosmic yet private, both playful and profound.” —New York Times

Leonard Cohen wrote the poems in Book of Longing—his first book of poetry in more than twenty years after 1984’s Book of Mercy—during his five-year stay at a Zen monastery on Southern California’s Mount Baldy, and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. This dazzling collection is enhanced by the author’s playful and provocative drawings, which interact in exciting, unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and often darkly humorous.

An international sensation, Book of Longing contains all the elements that have brought Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.

Links:

Indian Horse (2012)

by Richard Wagamese

  • Year Published: 2012
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, historical, challenging, emotional, sad, medium-paced
  • Won the 2013 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature
  • A film adaptation premiered at the 2017 TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival)

Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his story. With him, readers embark on a journey back through the life he’s led as a northern Ojibway, with all its joys and sorrows.

With compassion and insight, author Richard Wagamese traces through his fictional characters the decline of a culture and a cultural way. For Saul, taken forcibly from the land and his family when he’s sent to residential school, salvation comes for a while through his incredible gifts as a hockey player. But in the harsh realities of 1960s Canada, he battles obdurate racism and the spirit-destroying effects of cultural alienation and displacement. Indian Horse unfolds against the bleak loveliness of northern Ontario, all rock, marsh, bog and cedar. Wagamese writes with a spare beauty, penetrating the heart of a remarkable Ojibway man.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. I’d love to know which books you love or that you would recommend. Let me know in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

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First Woman’s garden

Excerpt from Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

Photo by Florian GIORGIO | Accessed on Unsplash.com

This is an excerpt from the book Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King.

First Woman’s garden. That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn. I don’t know where he comes from. Things like that happen, you know.

So there is that garden. And there is First Woman and Ahdamn. And everything is perfect. And everything is beautiful. And everything is boring.

So First Woman goes walking around with her head in the clouds, looking in the sky for things that are bent and need fixing. So she doesn’t see that tree. So that tree doesn’t see her. So they bump into each other.

Pardon me, says that Tree, maybe you would like something to eat.

That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree. Apples fall out. Melons fall out. Bananas fall out. Hot dogs. Fry bread, corn, potatoes. Pizza. Extra-crispy fried chicken.

Thank you, says First Woman, and she picks up all that food and brings it back to Ahdamn.

Talking trees! Talking trees! says that GOD. What kind of world is this?

“Did someone say food?” says Coyote.

“Sit down,” I says. “Boy, this story is going to take a long time.”

So that good woman brings all that food back to Ahdamn. Ahdamn is busy. He is naming everything.

You are a microwave oven, Ahdamn tells the Elk.

Nope, says that Elk. Try again.

You are a garage sale, Ahdamn tells the Bear.

We got to get you some glasses, says the Bear.

You are a telephone book, Ahdamn tells the Cedar Tree.

You’re getting closer, says the Cedar Tree.

You are a cheeseburger, Ahdamn tells Old Coyote.

It must be tie for lunch, says Old Coyote.

Never mind that, First Woman tells Ahdamn. Here is something to eat.

Wait a minute, says that GOD. That’s my garden. That’s my stuff.

“Don’t talk to me,” I says. “You better talk to First Woman.”

You bet I will, says that GOD.

So. There is that garden. And there is First Woman and Ahdamn. And there are the animals and the plants and all their relations. And there is all that food.

“Boy,” says Coyote, “that food certainly smells good.”

They can’t eat my stuff, says that GOD. And that one jumps into the garden.

Oh, oh, says First Woman when she sees that GOD land in her garden. Just when we were getting things organized.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Green Grass, Running Water – Summary

Here is the book summary from Goodreads:

King’s auspicious debut novel, Medicine River ( LJ 8/90), garnered critical acclaim and popular success (including being transformed into a TV movie). This encore, a genially wild tale with a serious heart, confirms the author’s prowess. It involves the creation of a creation story, the mission of four ancient Indians, and the comparatively realistic doings of 40-year-old-adolescent Lionel Red Dog, unfazable cleaning woman Babo, and various memorable Blackfoot and others in scenic Alberta. Clever verbal motifs not only connect the stories but add fun visual themes, including missing cars and a ubiquitous Western movie. In the end, everyone is thrown together by an earthquake at white human-made Parliament Lake, compliments of the four old Indians and the loopy trickster Coyote. Smart and entertaining, this novel deserves a big audience.

Copyright © 1993 by Thomas King.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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