All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward

 I saw Tanya Talaga deliver the first part of her five part Massey Lecture here in Thunder Bay.  I've never heard a Massey Lecture before, so I was curious if it would differ from the book form.

All Our Relations speaks largely to the suicide epidemic in Indigenous communities around the world.  Talaga argues that the inter-generational trauma caused by colonialism is largely at the root of this epidemic. Parents who themselves were traumatized in the residential schools and alienated from their culture are passing their trauma onto the younger generations, who in turn are bereft of their cultural and family ties, and, left feeling empty, are increasingly seeing suicide as the only way to deal with the pain and emptiness.  Indigenous people around the world are marginalized and fighting for their rights, often seen in negative and sometimes derogatory lights by the dominant cultures, and this as well is taking a toll on individuals.  

 Talaga shares some heartbreaking facts throughout the five lectures that comprise this book.  For this reason, All Our Relations is very informative and worth reading, particularly if you are part of the settler culture in places like North America, Australia, and Brazil.  I just wish the book was a little better organized; Talaga kind of goes all over the place with her anecdotes, and at times you are left wishing she had gone into more detail with them.

The Truth About Stories

While browsing through the library's Indigenous Knowledge section, I came across the 2003 CBC Massey Lecture by Thomas King: The Truth About Stories.  I was intrigued, so I grabbed it.

The Truth About Stories is a really quick read. Like all Massey Lectures, it is composed of 5 chapters which comprised the 5 lectures in the series (although this one had an added bonus chapter which was not part of the lecture series).  I'm not familiar with King's writing, but I quite enjoyed The Truth About Stories.  It meanders at times within the chapters, but always gets back on point, sometimes in unexpected ways.  His writing is very friendly; I felt like he was literally hanging out and chatting.  

I also really liked how he structured the lecture.  There's a lot of repetition, particularly at the beginning of each chapter (the same story is told, although the details differ a bit), and the ending is very poignant (for example, here's the ending of chapter 1):

Take Charm's story, for instance. It's yours. Di with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.

You've heard it now.

Like the beginning of each chapter, the end differs in the details (there are different stories in each chapter, after all). But they all end with those last two lines.  

I also really liked how King builds to his thesis within the lecture series.  Again, his language and tone are very colloquial, which kind of lulls you into a false sense of security.  But then, again and again within each chapter (and even moreso within the last chapter because that is the end of the lecture series), his meaning hits you almost to the gut (yes, I did find it very visceral).  

This is a book that I want to read again and again.  It strikes me as the type of book that will not only stay with you, but that you will get more from the more you read it.  I'm also very interested in reading more from King as I really enjoyed his writing style.

Network Effect

 

I completely forgot that Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot Diaries book by Martha Wells, was coming out this spring.  I also forgot that I put it on hold at the library.  So I was pleasantly surprised to get it last week! :)

I wasn't sure where this book would be taking Murderbot.  I thought the story ended quite nicely in book 4.  It starts out with Murderbot being contracted out to provide security for some of Dr. Mensah's family on a voyage.  Everything is going fine until their ship returns to Preservation space and is attacked by what looks like ART (from book 2).  While trying to protect Amena (a teenager from Mensah's family - I'm not 100% sure of what their relationship is as Amena keeps calling Mensah "second mother"), Murderbot and Amena are forced to flee the ship and end up on ART.  Unfortunately, ART is gone and there are strange grey people (possible aliens, or humans who have been modified by an alien remnant) on board.  After admitting to deleting ART, they get more than they bargained for with Murderbot destroying them (they mistakenly thought Murderbot was a human). 

Network Effect took a lot of crazy twists and turns.  Some of the other humans from the Preservation mission got trapped along with them (their ship got pulled into the wormhole that the aliens took ART's ship through). ART hid a backup of himself for Murderbot to find.  Looking for ART's crew leads everyone to the planet where the grey people are from, which was a lost colony with quite a history.  Half of ART's crew were sent down to the planet, while the other half remained on a shuttle as hostages.  ART and Murderbot decide to make Killware as a last resort, which ART ends up deploying onto the shuttle.  The Killware is a copy of Murderbot's personality, and ends up calling itself Murderbot 2.0.  Meanwhile Murderbot 1.0 went down to the planet to save ART's crew but ends up getting captured itself, which leads to a battle against the enemy targetControlSystem.  Luckily Murderbot 2.0 found its way to Murderbot 1.0 to help.

Despite all the fun stuff happening, I had a really hard time reading this book.  The middle, when everyone was trying to figure out what was going on and where the missing crew was, really dragged (as did Murderbot and ART's feud).  Unfortunately it took me a lot longer to read this book as a result (all the other Murderbot books I couldn't put down; this one I had a hard time picking back up).  That being said, it was an interesting story, and I am looking forward to Murderbot #6 (ART asked Murderbot to join it on its next adventure, and Murderbot decided it wanted to, as long as it can come back to Preservation to visit Mensah.  This was the first time Murderbot knew what it wanted).

Also I forgot to mention, Murderbot 2.0 helped another SecUnit hack its governor module on the shuttle to help rescue ART's crew there.  This new SecUnit, which called itself Three, wants to help Murderbot too.  So I'm quite interested to see what happens with a second rogue SecUnit!

Educated

Wow.  That's all I can say after reading Tara Westover's memoir Educated.  Here's the summary from Goodreads:

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

Educated is quite the story.  Not only did Westover manage to educate herself without ever attending elementary or high school, she also did so while dealing with physical and emotional abuse from her brother.  

The book is at times very hard to read (particularly some of the details of what her brother Shawn did to her), but the book itself is well written and overall easy to read.  I loved Westover's descriptions within the book, particularly of her mountain home in Idaho.  The phrases she used were beautiful and very evocative.

This is an incredible story and I'm very glad to have read it!

Who We are: Reflections on My Life and Canada

Elizabeth May's Who We Are: Reflections on My Life and Canada is another book my brother lent me quite some time ago.  May wrote it just before the 2015 election, reflecting on the changes Prime Minister Stephen Harper had enacted since becoming Prime Minister, both in terms of gutting Canada's environmental protections, and in terms of politics (how particularly under him, MPs are no longer representing their constituents, but are instead reprimanded severely for not towing the party line).  May looks at her own life, at what brought her to helm the Green Party of Canada, while also examining what Canada was, and what Canada can be once again.

For the most part I enjoyed May's writing.  But I did find I got bogged down in the middle of a lot of her chapters, often from having to flip back to see either who or what organization she was talking about.  I really wish there had been a listing of people and places rather like a Shakespearean dramatis personae (I have this problem a lot with nonfiction books).  But all in all, I'm glad to have (finally) read Who We Are; it's an eye-opening book into just what exactly is happening to Canadian politics in the modern world.

Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life

Just before the pandemic hit, the library got a brand new copy of Shakti Gawain's Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life.  I snagged it because visualization is the final part of the meditation method Emily Fletcher shared in Stress Less, Accomplish More; visualization is the part of the method that I feel the most lost with, so I thought a book on it would be worth reading.  I did start it back in like April, but I kind of lost interest; I restarted reading it about a week ago, and finished it yesterday.

Creative Visualization gives you the basics of how to use creative visualization within your life (basically, by changing the way you talk to yourself and believing that the universe is plentiful for everyone, you can start to manifest your desires in your own life).  Gawain then gives you a whole bunch of tools to help you bring creative visualization into your life (through using writing, creating vision boards/treasure maps, using mantras to help you change your negative self talk, etc). 

I found the book a bit tough to get through though.  It's not the type of book that you can easily read from cover to cover in one sitting.  For me, it was like I could only read so much of it before having to go off and do something else (almost like I needed time to really consider what was being said). I did like that she gives you so many different tools to try; you can easily choose one or two that sound interesting to you, and ignore anything you don't like the sounds of.  

Overlord: The Undead King

After finishing Iraq Under Siege, I wanted to read some fiction.  So I chose to read Overlord: The Undead King by Kugane Maruyama, a Japanese Light Novel (translated) that a friend lent me sometime ago. 

In Overlord, Momonga is one of the last players of a virtual world that is being shut down.  He stays in the game until the last minute, wanting to enjoy all that his guild had built during the game's heyday.  But when the servers shut down, Momonga finds himself still his character in what looks like the game world.  The NPCs who were always silent are now talking and have the backstories and personalities the guild members wrote for them (including the last minute change Momonga made for Albedo, which he feels incredibly guilty of).  Now Momonga needs to figure out where they are and whether or not he can trust all of the NPCs; he must now be the Overlord in truth!

I found Overlord a bit slow going in the beginning, even though it was necessary to set up the game world of Yggdrasil before everything became real.  But once the servers went down and the NPCs came alive, the book became super fun! I loved Momonga's attempts to appear outwardly calm and collected for everyone while internally he was freaking out.  I also loved that Maruyama included an intermission part way through the story that showed what the main NPCs were thinking of Momonga.  The end fight was also incredibly fun, where Momonga is trying to be super cautious but discovers that whatever world this is, he's so much more powerful than everyone.  It's a very fun story, and I'd love to read more!