Red Cedar

The post earlier today was actually inspired by a conversation I had with a co-worker this morning about books (I was in the process of lending her Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – the melancholy and mysterious tale of three friends sharing a second-rate life without ever really understanding why – it’s a wonderful novel)… In any event that book-loan lead us into the discussion of our top five favourite novels of all time.

Although it is very difficult to pick from all the great fictions I have read – I suspect my list would look something like this (in no order):

• Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• The Diviners – Margaret Laurence
• 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
• City of Darkness, City of Light – Marge Piercy

It’s an since these books share little in common – but they each have a special place on my permanent bookshelf  – necessitating a re-read once every few years at least.

Narrowing down is more difficult that it looks – Go on, give it a try. What are your favourite five?

I don’t really know if I need another project – but since I’m officially going to be taking a break from activism real soon now, perhaps it would be good to put some other odds and ends into my life and this one (if enough people are interested) might not take too much time – so I’m putting this out there to see if anyone is interested.

So here’s the pitch: There are tons of reader-review blogs out there where individuals or groups do the DIY-book-review thing to varying degrees of success – but I’ve noticed a specific lack of Canadian reader-review sites on the go. I’m not sure why this is since Canada has a very distinct literary tradition, and a very literate population – it seems odd to me (and I confess, I may just not be finding these sites if they exist). Are there people out there who would be interested in participating in such a project?

Specifically the blog would:

• review up to one book per week by a different reviewer
• focus on newer canadian literature (but could also be expanded to poetry, non-fiction)
• seek to publicize canlit via the blog format
• feature interviews with canadian writers if people were interested in doing them (thanks to diane for that suggestion)
• seek also to solicit advertising (i’ve never really done web projects to make money but for something like this why not)?
• seek to solicit review-copies of books from publishers (one established).

I am thinking 3-5 people each review 1-2 books per month. Optimally this would be 5 people doing 1 book per month which I think is do-able for people who really love to read and also like to talk about what they read. Thoughts? Any takers? Am I missing something about the viability of such a project? Send me your thoughts via email or as a comment on this post.