Poetic musings....

I have been trying to find books to read through non-traditional sources for me.  This was one that I found intriguing from the Canada Reads 2015 competition.  In future years, this may be a decent want to find some book club reads as well.

This was an easy, poetic read.  Books like this underscore why reading is so important to me.  Reading can offer a lens to understand different lives, and different experiences.  Reading can help bring people together, and help build empathy.  This is a story I don't know much about - what it would be like to grow up Vietnamese, and then to survive being a boat person and to land in the province of Quebec, Canada.  You can't ask for a greater difference.

This books narrative is more like memory, and I wouldn't say that it is entirely cohesive all the time, but it was enjoyable. This is a good library book for me because it was such a short read. There were lots of passages in which I paused to reflect the deeper meaning. Here are a few of them:

"He was still a hero, a true hero, because he couldn't help being one, because he is a hero without knowing it, without wanting it."

"When I meet young girls in Montreal or elsewhere who injure their bodies intentionally, deliberately, who want permanent scars to be drawn on their skin, I can't help secretly wishing they could meet other young girls whose permanent scars are so deep they're invisible to naked eye. I would like to seat them face to face and hear them make comparisons between a wanted scar and an inflicted scar, one that's paid for, the other that pays off, one visible, the other impenetrable, one inordinately sensitive, the other unfathomable, one drawn, the other misshapen."

It's funny, I don't really want to read any really LONG books right now.  About 400 pages is about perfect in my mind.  Just long enough to sink my teeth in to it, long enough that I get through it quickly and can start looking around to see what else is there.

I was checking through some of the books that I have read this year... and although Shantaram and the Magician's trilogy were both good... I don't really feel like there have been that many books that have blown me away this year.  I feel like my reading has been average... not spectacular.  Interesting how that goes sometimes.