Reading Series events are listed in order of occurance to the right in the section “Upcoming Events”.

Below are updates presented in order of release.

Monday, October 20, 2008 @ 7:30pm
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating.
Reading and Interview with Christopher Moore.

Compulsively readable, this first social history of the opening up of the Canadian West is a triumph of historical detective work and gives us Siggins at the top of her game.

While researching the biography of Louis Riel, Maggie Siggins became aware of a figure lurking in the background who had had a profound influence on the great Canadian reformer. This was his grand-mother Marie-Anne Lagimodière, née Gaboury. As Siggins’ research progressed, she came to regard Marie-Anne as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The perils of Laura Secord and Susanna Moodie paled in comparison, yet she remains largely unknown.

Beautiful and rebellious, Marie-Anne was still unmarried at twenty-five — unheard of in 1800s Quebec habitant society. Furthermore, once she did marry Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière, she insisted on accompanying her fur trapper husband to the uncharted wilderness of western Canada. The year was 1807, and no European woman had yet ventured west of the Great Lakes region. For the next thirty years, she would live among the native people or at fur-trading forts from Pembina to Edmonton House, leading an undoubtedly difficult life but one with freedoms unknown to women in western societies of her time.

Drawing from primary sources, Siggins paints a vivid portrait of life in the West, from survival on the plains and bison hunts to the tribal warfare triggered by the fur-trade economy. Through it all, Marie-Anne survived and thrived, living to ninety-six, the matriarch of a large and diverse family whose descendants still live in Manitoba.

Maggie Siggins is the author of ten books, including Riel: A Life of Revolution; Revenge of the Land: A Century of Greed, Tragedy, and Murder on a Saskatchewan Farm, winner of the Governor General’s Award; and A Canadian Tragedy: The Story of Joann and Colin Thatcher, on which the well-known miniseries Love and Hate was based. Author photo by Gerald Sperling.

Christopher Moore has been described as Canada’s most versatile writer of history. A winner of the Governor General’s Award and other literary prizes, he writes widely about Canadian history for adults and children. He has also developed historical materials for historic sites, museums, radio, and television, and he speaks frequently to a wide variety of audiences. He writes a long-running column on history and historians for The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine. Christopher is also a past chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

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Wednesday, December 3 2008
Hart House (Great Hall), 7 Hart House Circle
7:30pm
Tickets $12. Limited seating.
For tickets call: (416) 640-5836 or visit the Refund’s desk at 214 College St.

A lecture.

In this startlingly original vision of Canada, thinker John Ralston Saul unveils 3 founding myths. Saul argues that the famous “peace, order, and good government” that supposedly defines Canada is a distortion of the country’s true nature. Every single document before the BNA Act, he points out, used the phrase “peace, welfare, and good government,” demonstrating that the well-being of its citizenry was paramount. He also argues that Canada is a Métis nation, heavily influenced and shaped by aboriginal ideas: egalitarianism, a proper balance between individual and group, and a penchant for negotiation over violence are all aboriginal values that Canada absorbed. Another obstacle to progress, Saul argues, is that Canada has an increasingly ineffective elite, a colonial non-intellectual business elite that doesn’t believe in Canada. It is critical that we recognize these aspects of the country in order to rethink its future.

John Ralston Saul’s philosophical trilogy— Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion and The Unconscious Civilization—has had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. The conclusion to this trilogy, On Equilibrium—an exploration of the six qualities of the new humanism—is a persuasive and groundbreaking exploration of the human struggle for personal and social balance.

Mr. Saul has written five novels, including The Birds of Prey and The Field Trilogy. These works deal with the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual. Like his non-fiction, his novels have been translated into many languages.

He has received many national and international awards for his work. The Unconscious Civilization won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, as well as the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues. His reinterpretation of the nature of Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin, also won a Montador Award and was chosen by Maclean’s magazine as one of the ten best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. His novel The Paradise Eater won the Premio Lettarario Internazionale in Italy. Most recently he received the Pablo Neruda Medal in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Neruda’s birth.

Mr. Saul was born in Ottawa and studied at McGill University and the University of London, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1972.

Author photo by Ned Pratt.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 @ 7:30pm
Hart House Library
7 Hart House Circle
Free

Rachel Berman wants everything to be perfect. As an overprotective, single mother of two, she is acutely aware of the statistical dangers lurking around every corner–which makes her snap decision to aid a stranded motorist wholly uncharacteristic. Leonard Bean is broken down on the highway with Olivia, his rodent-obsessed, relentlessly curious, learning disabled 10-year-old daughter. To the chagrin of Rachel’s children, who are about to be linked to the most mocked girl in school, Rachel and Len begin dating. And when her father receives terrible news, little Olivia needs a hero more than ever.

But the world refuses to be predictable. When personal crisis profoundly alters Rachel’s relationship with a very wild, very special little girl, this perfectionist mother finds herself drawn into a mystery from her past and toward a new appreciation for her own children’s imperfect lives. Inside Out Girl shows that no matter how much our world can crumble around us, it is our strength that defines us. The challenges we face only enrich our lives and teach us lessons that will last a lifetime.

Tish Cohen, a 2008 finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her debut novel, Town House (currently in development as a feature film with Fox 2000 and John Carney, the award-winning, critically acclaimed director of Once), has delivered yet again with her second book for adults, the touching story Inside Out Girl.

“One day when she looked at the portrait, she considered how blessed she had been in life. She contemplated her good fortune in finding an upright man like Akbar Ahmad as her life partner and felt grateful for his bounteous legacy, which released her from all financial cares. Akbar Ahmad looked back at her, his face cast in an expression of long suffering. Mona’s eyes welled up with tears.”–from The Story of a Widow

After the death of her husband Akbar Ahmad, Mona finds herself settling ambivalently into a new life. But the calm rhythm of her days–gardening, cooking, time with her neighbours and family in Karachi–is upset by the appearance of Salamat Ali, the new tenant in her friend Mrs. Baig’s house. Vivacious, friendly, and at times almost impertinent, Salamat Ali is both a breath of fresh air and a disconcerting new presence in Mona’s life, and their awkward meetings always seem to end in embarrassment or misunderstanding. When Salamat Ali, encouraged by Mrs. Baig, presents Mona with a marriage proposal, she is forced to consider what kind of future she wishes to make for herself–and what her past with Akbar Ahmad really means.

The possibility of Mona marrying Salamat Ali shocks her grown daughters Tanya and Amber, and scandalizes her extended family, according to whom Mona’s happiness comes second to what people say about widows who remarry. As Mona negotiates the complex web of tradition-bound in-laws and gossiping, interfering relatives, she finds Salamat Ali waking her to the pleasures of life that thirty years with her dour first husband all but smothered. But if Salamat Ali helps her discover something essential, he also exposes her to new risks, and new dangers.

The Story of a Widow is a beautifully observant novel, one that pays careful attention to the delicate movements of the heart in romantic and family life. But it is equally concerned with the mores of a society in which traditional roles both support and constrain men and–particularly–women. Gently humorous and profoundly perceptive, The Story of a Widow is the moving tale of a woman’s discovery of her voice, and herself.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author and translator. His critically acclaimed translation of the Indo-Islamic epic, The Adventures of Amir Hamza, was published by the Modern Library in 2007. He has also translated the works of contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed. He is also the author of the children’s picture book The Cobbler’s Holiday or Why Ants Don’t Wear Shoes. He is currently writing a novel set in the early years after Pakistan’s creation, and translating the Urdu classic, Hoshruba–The Land and The Tilism, considered the greatest magical fantasy of the Indo-Islamic world. Author photo by Nina Subin.

One of the most powerful, gripping works of fiction to come out of Canada, Red Dog, Red Dog is Patrick Lane’s virtuoso debut novel.

An epic novel of unrequited dreams and forestalled lives, Red Dog, Red Dog is set in the mid-1950s, in a small town in the interior of B.C. in the unnamed Okanagan Valley. The novel focuses on the Stark family, centring on brothers Eddy and Tom, who are bound together by family loyalty and inarticulate love.

There is Tom and Eddy’s father, Elmer Stark, a violent man with a troubled past, and Lillian, who married as a girl to escape life on the farm with her widowed mother, and now retreats into her own isolation. Unrepentant, bitter, older brother Eddy speeds freely along, his desperate path fuelled by drugs and weapons, while Tom, a loner, attempts to conceal their secrets and protect what remains of the family. Eventually, an unspeakable crime causes him to come face to face with something traumatic that has lain hidden in him since he was a boy. Narrated in part by one of the dead infant daughters Elmer has buried, the story unfolds gradually, as it weaves in family stories that reach back to the depression days and the harsh life of settlers in the 1880s West.

This is also a novel about a small community of people, about complicated loyalties, about betrayals and shifts of power. Filled with moments of harrowing violence and breathtaking description, of shattering truths and deep humanity, Red Dog, Red Dog is about the legacies of the past and the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption. With this astonishing novel, one of Canada’s best poets propels himself into the forefront of our finest novelists.

Patrick Lane is the author of 21 books of poetry, and has received many awards for his writing, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (1979), the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry (1988), and two National Magazine Awards. Author photo by Diana Nethercott.