Between my persistant cold and my nasty habit of reading several books at once, I finished a bunch of books lately and failed to blog them. So here they all are!
Hell's Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada's Great War, 1914-1918, by JL Granatstein.
This is an excellent book on WWI. It describes the deroulement of the war and the experiences of everyday people (both soldiers and on the homefront) in a way that can easily be understood by a 21st-century readers. It does go into the politics of the time, but, again with the modern-day reader clearly being the target audience. It's very Canaa-centric so you get very little idea of what was going on in the rest of the world, but it's still a good starting point. The mixed blessing is that it's a giant coffee-table sized book. This is good because it has rooms for lots of good pictures, but it's bad because you can't read it on the subway. It's still worth perusing at home though.
The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World, by Marti Olsen Laney
This book is all about me! It explains precisely how my brain works, with diagrams and neurological explanations and everything! It turns out introversion affects my life in more ways than I originally thought, from my Hufflepuff approach to relationships, to my childhood self's feeling insulted that my parents felt the need to bring toys to amuse me on long car rides. It turns out that my low novelty seeking is a direct result of my introversion. Because of the way electrical signals travel through the brain (I'm not quite at the point of fully understanding this, but I'm very close), introverts don't have as much need for dopamine, and can actually feel overstimulated if they get too much dopamine. In practical terms, this means that I'm perfectly happy reading my book and think a big party sounds exhausting - which I already knew, but it's cool that there's an actual neurological reason for it. Introversion can also affect a person's ability to think of stuff to say - their mind might go blank when called upon to speak, but they'll be able to articulate their thoughts perfectly later on. I've never experienced this in English, but I get it all the time when working in other languages, so it was quite reassuring to learn that it's not a flaw in my mastery of other languages, but rather a neurological thing that simply is not as apparent in the English part of my brain. This book is interesting for anyone who is an introvert, but it is an ABSOLUTE MUST READ for anyone who is an extrovert but has an introverted partner or child. My life would have been much easier if my parents had read this book when I was little, but they couldn't because it wasn't published until 2002.
Dark Age Ahead, by Jane Jacobs
I learned so much about so many things from this book! It's so broad ranging, and every part was enlightening. For example, did you know that General Electric was behind most major cities' decision to switch from trolleys to buses? Did you know that pre-industrial agrarian societies had to be inherently conservative for their survival, but once industrialism came aloneg, technology started to grow exponentially, and society changed into a culture that had to be progressive in order to survive. This is an interesting parallel with the fact that modern rural society tends to be more conservative and urban society tends to be more progressive (obvoiusly the cause isn't the same because modern rural society is still highly influenced by industrialism, but it's still interesting). This book also finally managed to explain the whole fiscal imbalance thing to me in a way that the many newspaper articles on the subject could not. I'd always found complaining about fiscal imbalance distasteful, because I thought of it as the same as wealthy people who complain that they have to pay more taxes than poor people. But Jacobs' explanation made me realize that Toronto, for example, is not a single entity that has to pay more taxes because it's wealthy. It's a collection of 2 million individuals living in close proximity in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Each individual is taxed differently depending on their own income, so the taxation itself is still fair, but the whole equalization thing takes away the benefits of economy of scale because provinces are really artificial entities, but certain aspects of federal legislation consider them a lot more important. But I digress. Overall, this book is very interesting, well-researched, and well-written. It falls under the "read this to feel smart" category.
Woman in Bronze, by Antanas Sileika
This book needs to be a movie! It's historical and epic and coming of age and doesn't want to be put down. Plus, the action is actually action, so it would translate perfectly to the screen. Someone make a movie of this!
Souvenir of Canada 2, by Douglas Coupland
I get the impression that Coupland didn't have quite enough material for the a second book. Most of it was just as interesting as the first book, but there were many self-indulgent pages in the middle dealing with Canada House, one of Coupland's own projects, plus some of what felt like filler material. Some of it worked for me, like the adorable pictures of baby goslings, and some of it didn't, like a page containing nothing but a list of all the men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I don't know whether this was all part of the artistic vision or not, but it felt to me like filler, which kind of ruined the effect.
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