WHO: Annabel Lyon is the author of a story collection ( Oxygen), a collection of novellas ( The Best Thing for You), a young adult novel ( All-Season Edie) and a novel, last year's The Golden Mean, for which she received Governor-General's Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations, and won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
WHAT: Shake Hands with The Devil, by Roméo Dallaire; A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong; C'mon Papa, by Ryan Knighton
WHY: I read on the SkyTrain because I have two small kids at home. One day a week, I go to work at the central branch of the Vancouver Library, the coliseum building that looks like it's made out of cookie, which is about a 45-minute ride from my house, so that's my time to read. I can't read in cars, I get travel sick, but the SkyTrain is nice and smooth and up in the air, and that just goes well with reading for some reason.
The one I'm most into at the moment is Roméo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil. I'm embarrassed to say I'm just getting around to it, but it's a fascinating account of the genocide in Rwanda and I'm now thinking, first, how on Earth did I not read this book sooner, and second, everyone needs to read this book. I'm so impressed by Dallaire; it's a painful read, but he's such a talented writer.
A Short History of Myth is just a wee little softcover, and it's part of the research I'm doing for the next book I'm working on. It starts with the Paleolithic period, the hunters and gatherers, then goes through the Neolithic period with the farmers, and then to ancient Greece, which is where I'm at right now. It's got me thinking about the evolution of myth and how the beliefs in gods reflect people's own lives and to what extent the gods were present or absent and how this changed based on the structure of the society, whether it was nomadic or rural or urban. I'm working on a sequel to The Golden Mean; it'll be set in a similar time period. The Golden Mean didn't go into mythology because that's not what Aristotle was all about, but now I want to really dive into Greek mythology very specifically. Armstrong is witty, she's smart, and it's a really nice introduction to the subject.
I just finished C'mon Papa, by Ryan Knighton. It's going to be published soon, and I read it because I got to blurb it for the publisher, but it really was a pleasure to blurb. It's the experience of a newly blind new father and his experience with simple things like putting his baby in a carrier and crossing the street with just a stick to guide him. It's very funny in parts, but you get this undercurrent of anger in it as well. And his description of labour and childbirth from the point of view of a blind male observer, using mostly his hearing, was more accurate to me than what I've read from women who've experienced it. I haven't read his last book, Cockeyed, which talks about the author going blind, and now I want to go back and look at it because I was so taken with this one. I think it would be interesting to anyone experiencing early parenthood, not just an audience interested in blindness.