Friday 1 December 2017

Suggested Books. January, 2018.

Red Reader Book Shortlist.

This is a list of books to choose from in order to get us started, but please feel free to bring suggestions to the first meeting and if the group agrees, we'll add it to the list. After finishing each book, we'll decide together what to read next
The Silent March / C.M. Klyne
Winnipeg, 1919. The Winnipeg General Strike, the Spanish influenza and a sociopathic personality coalesce to forge a summer of strife, death and hope for a community still suffering the pestilence of the first world war. Can bacteriologist Dr. Anna Williams, driven by the need to prove herself in a predominantly male research lab and responding to a panicky public health department, overcome the resistant attitudes of her male colleagues, to unlock the mysteries surrounding the deadly influenza virus? Will the infamous Committee of One Thousand subvert the intentions of the strike leaders and the growing union movement and prevent the spread of Bolshevism upon Canadian soil? Will Earle Nelson, a murderous sociopath and righteous zealot, force his will upon those he perceives as undesirable and unacceptable? Follow Klyne's story as he leads you through the streets of Winnipeg - reliving historical events with brilliant character creations whose intricate paths of emotions, ideas and conflicts culminated in what became known as Bloody Saturday.
The Bolshevik’s Revenge / Allan Levine
The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike is the dramatic backdrop for the third instalment of the Sam Klein Mystery Series. The "war to end all wars" has just ended, the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia and most of the Western world is convinced that a widespread workers' revolt is imminent. Winnipeg is no exception as sector after sector of the city is shut down by a massive General Strike, and when one of the city's most prominent capitalists is murdered, detective Sam Klein is called in to solve the case before the city erupts in chaos.





Mr. Jones / Margaret Sweatman
Emmett jones is adrift. Having firebombed civilians as a pilot during World War II, Emmett searches for something to cling to when life loses focus. Post-war, he becomes compulsively drawn to John Norfield, a former POW who has found his focus in communism.
Set in a time of rampant paranoia, "Mr. Jones" peels back the veneer of Canadian politics to reveal a nation willing to sacrifice its own. It is a fearful time, a time of "peace" at the onset of the nuclear age.
Emmett's existence comes under scrutiny. His relationship with Norfield makes him a target of security forces. His marriage, his job, even his child are the target of investigation. And as the nuclear arms race heats up, Mr. Jones sets himself on a path that will risk the lives of everyone he holds dear.
Evoking the classic works of le Carre and Greene, Sweatman's novel is a shattering exploration of a past where world governments threaten annihilation while training housewives in the proper techniques for sweeping up radioactive dust.
Song of Batoche / Maia Caron (March, 2018)
A people’s struggle for rights to their land and identity, a woman’s fight for ownership of her body and soul.
When Louis Riel arrives in Batoche, Saskatchewan, in the summer of 1884, he discovers that the beautiful Métisse Josette Lavoie is a granddaughter of the famous chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally. But Josette resists becoming his disciple when she learns that Riel considers the Métis a lost tribe of Israel and himself the prophet who will lead them to the Promised Land. As General Middleton’s army marches to put down the “savage half-breeds,” both Josette and Gabriel Dumont draw ever closer to one another in their struggle to manage Riel, who is determined that he will meet Middleton only in Batoche, the City of God.
The historical events unfold from inside the beautiful mind of Louis Riel, his heroic war chief Gabriel Dumont, a subversive Catholic priest, a spy for John A. Macdonald, and three women with secrets: Madeleine Dumont, Marguerite Riel, and Josette Lavoie, whose journey to redemption emerges out of devastating acts of deception as the troops converge on Batoche to destroy the Métis Nation.
Encountering Riel / David Orr
David Orr’s interest in Riel’s 1885 Resistance began with a revelation. He discovered that his father’s elderly Métis friend was the younger brother of the scout who captured Louis Riel after the Battle of Batoche. Then, during his tenure as a judge on the bench in Saskatchewan, Orr grew increasingly convinced that understanding the Riel Resistance is central to a comprehension of how modern Canada came to be. Encountering Riel is the reimagining of these events from the perspective of a character he calls Willie Lorimer.
It is 1885. Willie Lorimer is a thoroughly unwarlike student of poetry at the University of Toronto. Unfortunately, Willie has forgotten to resign his second lieutenant’s commission in a long-disbanded University militia regiment. Now he is called up to fight against Louis Riel and his force of hardened frontiersmen, in the Resistance of 1885.
Willie must leave his fiancé, a spirited young lady named Alice Niven. He and his captain, the hot-headed, impetuous Roley Collison, join the Canadian militia in its brutally arduous trek westwards. Meanwhile, Alice fights her own private war for independence, against her bullying Victorian parents.
In the West, the inexperienced militia somehow prevail against a tough, courageous enemy. But after an interview with the captured Riel, the young Canadian officers must confront their own disillusionment with a cause much less just than they had believed.
Red Cavalry / Isaac Babel
One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, the Red Cavalry cycle retains today the shocking freshness that made Babel's reputation when the stories were first published in the 1920s. Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.
Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.
Midnight in the Century / Victor Serge
In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin’s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge’s searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution.
Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and history. They struggle in the unlikely company of Russian Orthodox Old Believers who are also suffering for their faith. Against unbelievable odds, the young Rodion will escape captivity and find a new life in the wild. Surviving the dark winter night of the soul, he rediscovers the only real, and most radical, form of resistance: hope.


A Tale of Two Cities / Charles Dickens
‘Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; -- the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!'
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.
Waste Heritage / Irene Baird
A new critical edition of the acknowledged best Canadian novel of the 1930s. Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is a groundbreaking work of Canadian fiction based on the dramatic and violent labour disputes that took place in British Columbia in 1938. The story follows the progress of two friends, Matt Striker, a 23-year-old from Saskatchewan, and his simple-minded companion Eddy, as they travel from Vancouver to Victoria following the occupation of the Vancouver Post Office. Like the unemployed masses that took siege of the Post Office, Matt and Eddy yearn for relief after years of economic depression. Empathetic and tragic, Waste Heritage has been praised as Canada's Grapes of Wrath and the most important Canadian novel of the 1930s.
Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell (February, 2018)
‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion and clarity, describing with bitter intensity the bright hopes and cynical betrayals of that chaotic episode: the revolutionary euphoria of Barcelona, the courage of ordinary Spanish men and women he fought alongside, the terror and confusion of the front, his near-fatal bullet wound and the vicious treachery of his supposed allies.


Read Homage to Catalonia online at george-orwell.org


Not In My Father's Footsteps / Terrence Rundle West
It’s the 1930s. In Montreal, tensions are running high. French vs. English. Jew vs. Christian. Have vs. have-not. The city is swirling with unrest. From Outremont to St. Urbain Street, people are struggling to lift off the yoke of strife and despair caused by the most devastating economic depression the world has ever experienced. For young, single men with no jobs, the only option is to ride the rails. Perhaps go to Vancouver. Or maybe Spain, to fight the fascists. What have they got to lose?
That’s the question Terrence Rundle West asks in his latest book, Not In My Father’s Footsteps,a historical novel that follows two young men from the bread lines and hobo jungles of Canada to the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War.
Although Canada remained neutral during this conflict, more than 1,200 Canadian soldiers fought to defend the reform-minded Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascists. In fact, the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, or "Mac-Paps," comprised the second largest foreign contingent in Spain, yet its members were shunned on their return to Canada. Forgotten, for the most part, until now.


Storming Heaven / Denise Giardina
Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.
In 1921, an army of 10,000 unemployed pro-union coal miners took up arms and threatened to overthrow the governments of two West Virginia counties. They were greeted by U.S. Army airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. This book recounts the real story of what happened--and where it all went wrong.
Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C. J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain--the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.



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