Books have been read, but not blogged, so let's do a catch up post:

Number 3 of the year is Some Great Thing by Lawerence Hill. Saw this book for cheap, and since I enjoyed his Book of Negroes, thought I'd give something else by him a shot. This book tells the story of the unlikely named Mahatma Grafton, a young, rather aimless black man who returns to his hometown of Winnipeg and gets a job as a reporter with the Winnipeg Herald. He doesn't partcularly care about the job, nor about Winnipeg, nor about his father's ambitions for him. Hat is like a lot of his generation, he just doesn't really care about much. But that changes over the course of the book as he gets involved with racial tensions and the entire Manitoba language-rights issues. It's a very interesting read because it's something I really knew nothing about. Oh sure I remember language-rights as an issue overall, plus of course the Referendum, but this book is a nice microcosm of the unrest that was happening over a lot of Canada at the time. The characters are all well done, and, despite being a large cast, quite memorable. There's some oddities that make it really fun (the exchange reporter from Cameroon for one) and overall, it's a very clever novel.

Number 4 of the year is Gwenhwyfar by Mercedes Lackey. Not a bad book. I definitely like books where Gwen isn't a whiny bitch, but this also felt like Lackey had watched that horrendous King Arthur movie (y'know, the one with Clive Owen) and decided that Warrior! Gwen needed some backstory. So yeah, this Gwen is a warrior, which is fine and dandy but doesn't really bring that much new to the character. I did like that Lackey brought the idea of the 'three Gwens' that Arthur marries into one tale (this is something that isn't dealt with much in most of the Legends) and I liked that she gave Gwen some interesting sisters. But overall, the 'Arthurian' part of the story isn't dealt with at all so the book actually feels strangely disconnected from what it should seemlessly be a part of. As a look at gender roles and equality in early Britain, it's a great book, as an Arthurian tale? Not so much.

Number 5 of the year is Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. This is the first book of his tale of Jody and Thomas, and the one I should've started with rather than You Suck. So it was nice to get the backstory down and how it all got started. Fun as always, Moore is rarely disappointing. Best line? "He's doing rather well for a non-swimmer".

Ok, gotta get reading some more it seems.

And the first book of 2010 is The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. This is the book that won Canada Reads in 2009. It tells the tale of
Aminata Diallo, an 11-year-old child, is taken from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea and cross the Atlantic where she is sold as a slave in South Carolina. Her life is torn asunder and becomes a matter of survival, but she is bright and a trained mid-wife, and these skills serve her well. Years later, she finds freedom, serving the British in the American Revolutionary War and having her name entered in the historic "Book of Negroes." This book, an actual historical document, is an archive of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the United States in order to resettle in Nova Scotia.

It's a tough book to read. Deservedly so though. The sheer amount of suffering and horror the slaves who were stolen from Africa went through is tough to imagine. Actually, I admit, I don't want to imagine it, but Hill spells it out in stark terms, you can't look away from what he's describing. it's hard to read about the filth and the sickness and the degredation and the rape and the children that Aminata had taken away from her. But that would've been par for the course, and even though this is a fictionalized account of a slave's life, you know it's not really fiction at all.

But there is a strange amount of hope in this book. As I said, Aminata is clever, she learns to read and this helps her raise her station in life, even though society makes it very difficult for her to do so.

The ending could be considered a little trite, but upon considering all the hardships and horror Aminata had to face during her life, it was nice there was a happy ending.

This book goes well with Bury the Chains, the account of the abolishionist movement in England that Aminata eventually gets herself mixed up in. They are both books that need to be read.