Hannah SungTim Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Who: Hannah Sung is a Canadian television and radio broadcaster.
What: Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer; The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin; Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
I picked up The Disappeared because I was at the airport. My flight was only an hour, but there went my weekend - I couldn't stop reading it after I got home. The novel is about a Canadian woman and a Cambodian man who meet as young people in Montreal. He's studying abroad when the border to Cambodia closes, but when it opens again he returns. It's heartbreaking.
What I love about Eating Animals was that the person the author thanks the most in acknowledgments was the woman working to create change in the U.S. slaughterhouse system. This shows that the book isn't a manifesto for veganism, it's a manifesto for becoming conscious. Now, unless I know where meat is coming from, I can't eat it.
I do the CBC Book Club and we're having a month of Jane Austen mania. It's also about the pop-cultural universe that includes Jane Austen's work, and all the monster mash-ups. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is exactly as it sounds: an adaptation of the Jane Austen classic … with zombies. In this version of the story, Mrs. Bennett is still doing her best to get her daughters married off well, but the girls are busy aiming muskets at "dreadfuls" and "unmentionables" as zombies keep crashing the party. It's funny.
It's perfect that in the photo I'm reading while on the move: My favourite place to read is when I'm in transit. When I was travelling this winter in Asia, I was on every mode of transport and I read all the Canada Reads books.