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Yesterday I went to a book club meeting. The book we were discussing was Wînipêk by Niigaan Sinclair:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/673193/winipek-by-niigaan-sinclair/9780771099175
The six people at yesterday's meeting had varying views on the book and we had quite a lively discussion. One of the members suggested it should be required reading in high school history classes.
For me it was a fascinating book: well researched and documented but also very personal, relating events from throughout his life and the lives of people he knows, how he thought about the events when they happened and how he thinks about them now in retrospect. It's told in short pieces or vignettes, usually only a few pages each. I found it highly readable, somewhat to my surprise.
It was even more of a surprise when I woke up as usual this morning to Ottawa Morning on the radio and learned that Niigaan Sinclair was going to be interviewed on the show, just before the 7:30 local news. It was in connection with some [ceremonial or sacred or at any rate highly meaningful to indigenous people] items that have been held at the Vatican and which the Vatican had long ago promised to return, and now it seems soon will be ... sort of. Apparently they will go back, initially at least, to the Canadian Council of Bishops, meaning there will undoubtedly be further delays before they are restored to their rightful owners or guardians or whomever, and allowed to resume their intended purposes in indigenous life. But anyway, he set things out far more eloquently than I possibly could so if you're interested, you can listen to him here:
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100-ottawa-morning/clip/16176874-indigenous-artifacts-held-vatican-museums-heading-back-canada
Anyway, it's said that truth is stranger than fiction. And I guess reconciliation is stranger to us, and much much harder for us, than ... well, most things anyway. Maybe you can fill in the blank?
Along with the Sinclair book we were going to discuss, I had with me at yesterday's meeting another book that I had nearly finished and that I was finding absolutely riveting. A novel this time, by Marie Bostwick, about a book club. The Book Club for Troublesome Women.
It's set in the year 1963 in a new subdivision in Concordia, Virginia, and concerns four married women of various ages and at various stages of their lives. Three of the four have children; all are housewives dealing (with varying degrees of success) with social constraints and expectations, mostly associated with gender. And all have ideas about how they want to live their lives. Margaret Ryan wants to be a writer; Bitsy Cobb (the youngest of the group) wants to be a vet, loves working with horses and collecting vegetarian recipes; Viv Buschetti worked as nurse during the war and looks forward to resuming her nursing career once her six children are all in school; Charlotte Gustafson is the bohemian one, an unsuccessful, manic moody artist who has spent time in a psychiatric facility, comes from a family of means but is definitely the wild child black sheep of the family.
So anyway, Margaret, who is tired of some of the mindless neighbourhood kaffee klatsches, decides to set up
a book club. And the book decided on for their first selection is Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Some of the other selections include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Mary McCarthy's The Group
Anyway, what I loved about the book was how well-drawn and true-to-life all these women were, how they rallied to support each other in their crises, how we learned about their families and their backstories over the course of the book. It didn't hurt that I had read number of these books myself and they had impacted my life too, although really these women were more of my mother's generation than mine. But I'm old enough to remember 1963 reasonably clearly: the early days of the space race, the Kennedy assassination and funeral, and so on.
Of course, 1963 was a pivotal year in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the world too. Real-life people like Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Jacquie Kennedy and a few other people had small roles in the book. The author relates in her Afterword which of the events described in the book were strictly factual and which were just her imagining of how it might have been.
Marie Bostwick is a NY Times bestselling author, so it's pretty easy to find reviews of the book, questions for discussion, etc. Also this party kit, which could be fun if you're into this sort of thing:
https://mariebostwick.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/TBCFTW-Party-Kit.pdf
I also want to mention this book that I read a few years ago, and that struck a lot of responsive chords (some of them literal ones) with me:
1963, The Year of the Revolution: How Youth Changed the World with Music, Art and Fashion. By Robin Morgan and Ariel Leve (HarperCollins, 2013)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/673193/winipek-by-niigaan-sinclair/9780771099175
The six people at yesterday's meeting had varying views on the book and we had quite a lively discussion. One of the members suggested it should be required reading in high school history classes.
For me it was a fascinating book: well researched and documented but also very personal, relating events from throughout his life and the lives of people he knows, how he thought about the events when they happened and how he thinks about them now in retrospect. It's told in short pieces or vignettes, usually only a few pages each. I found it highly readable, somewhat to my surprise.
It was even more of a surprise when I woke up as usual this morning to Ottawa Morning on the radio and learned that Niigaan Sinclair was going to be interviewed on the show, just before the 7:30 local news. It was in connection with some [ceremonial or sacred or at any rate highly meaningful to indigenous people] items that have been held at the Vatican and which the Vatican had long ago promised to return, and now it seems soon will be ... sort of. Apparently they will go back, initially at least, to the Canadian Council of Bishops, meaning there will undoubtedly be further delays before they are restored to their rightful owners or guardians or whomever, and allowed to resume their intended purposes in indigenous life. But anyway, he set things out far more eloquently than I possibly could so if you're interested, you can listen to him here:
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100-ottawa-morning/clip/16176874-indigenous-artifacts-held-vatican-museums-heading-back-canada
Anyway, it's said that truth is stranger than fiction. And I guess reconciliation is stranger to us, and much much harder for us, than ... well, most things anyway. Maybe you can fill in the blank?
Along with the Sinclair book we were going to discuss, I had with me at yesterday's meeting another book that I had nearly finished and that I was finding absolutely riveting. A novel this time, by Marie Bostwick, about a book club. The Book Club for Troublesome Women.
It's set in the year 1963 in a new subdivision in Concordia, Virginia, and concerns four married women of various ages and at various stages of their lives. Three of the four have children; all are housewives dealing (with varying degrees of success) with social constraints and expectations, mostly associated with gender. And all have ideas about how they want to live their lives. Margaret Ryan wants to be a writer; Bitsy Cobb (the youngest of the group) wants to be a vet, loves working with horses and collecting vegetarian recipes; Viv Buschetti worked as nurse during the war and looks forward to resuming her nursing career once her six children are all in school; Charlotte Gustafson is the bohemian one, an unsuccessful, manic moody artist who has spent time in a psychiatric facility, comes from a family of means but is definitely the wild child black sheep of the family.
So anyway, Margaret, who is tired of some of the mindless neighbourhood kaffee klatsches, decides to set up
a book club. And the book decided on for their first selection is Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Some of the other selections include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Mary McCarthy's The Group
Anyway, what I loved about the book was how well-drawn and true-to-life all these women were, how they rallied to support each other in their crises, how we learned about their families and their backstories over the course of the book. It didn't hurt that I had read number of these books myself and they had impacted my life too, although really these women were more of my mother's generation than mine. But I'm old enough to remember 1963 reasonably clearly: the early days of the space race, the Kennedy assassination and funeral, and so on.
Of course, 1963 was a pivotal year in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the world too. Real-life people like Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Jacquie Kennedy and a few other people had small roles in the book. The author relates in her Afterword which of the events described in the book were strictly factual and which were just her imagining of how it might have been.
Marie Bostwick is a NY Times bestselling author, so it's pretty easy to find reviews of the book, questions for discussion, etc. Also this party kit, which could be fun if you're into this sort of thing:
https://mariebostwick.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/TBCFTW-Party-Kit.pdf
I also want to mention this book that I read a few years ago, and that struck a lot of responsive chords (some of them literal ones) with me:
1963, The Year of the Revolution: How Youth Changed the World with Music, Art and Fashion. By Robin Morgan and Ariel Leve (HarperCollins, 2013)
