Tag Archives: Adult Fiction

Celebrating Ukrainian Heritage Month

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Cover image for Andrei Kurkov's novel Grey Bees.

September is Ukrainian Heritage Month here in Ontario, so I wanted to share some recommendations from our Ukrainian collection. You loyal readers out there will hopefully be tempted to explore some of these intriguing reads. Included below are Ukrainian, Canadian-Ukrainian, and other authors with ties to the country. Given that they make up a significant proportion of our population, Ukrainian people have substantially contributed to our society (Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is Ukrainian-Canadian, for example). This contribution includes the development of a spectrum of rich artistic and cultural expression.

Andrei Kurkov

Andrei Kurkov was born in Russia and writes his fiction in Russian, but he moved to Kyiv when he was only two years old. His identity has been steeped in the experience of living there, and he’s become one of the most well-known Ukrainian writers the world over. With the advent of the war in Ukraine, he has become something of a representative for his people, even sharing a personal war diary with BBC Radio 4. Here he talks with the Guardian about getting used to air raid alerts sounding through his cellphone several times a day.

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The Bountiful Benefits of Book Clubs

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Interested in joining a book club? Check out VPL’s adult book club programs on Eventbrite!  

At the end of summer, I like to do a rewatch of one of my comfort films, The Jane Austen Book Club. I pick this time of year because the setting is crisp Northern California, seemingly perpetually at sunset. It’s a perfect transition into fall. It’s also a great example of what makes book clubs so appealing. In the film (and the book upon which it’s based), the Jane Austen Book Club is formed as a salve for a friend group going through various crises.

As the characters delve into the novels, they start recognizing themselves in Austen’s stories. They bring their own unique experiences and struggles to their understanding of Austen’s themes, leading to thoughtful discussions of characters and events with their own personal spins. Take, for example, the discussions of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price (“I love Fanny. She puts her family’s needs before her own” “She’d probably be easier to like if she would allow some weakness in others”) or Pride and Prejudice’s Charlotte Lucas (“I kind of admire Charlotte for looking at her situation and deciding to marry Mr. Collins … She knows he’ll never be the love of her life, but that’s okay”).  

These kinds of nuanced discussions are the result of a group of disparate readers coming together over a shared book; a single reader might pick up on certain themes, or form certain ideas, but those ideas can be subject to the reader’s prejudice. Sharing them with other readers can open up a whole new world of ideas. One of my favourite aspects of books clubs is simply seeing what worked about a book (or didn’t work) for different readers and getting into why. Whether the group agrees or not isn’t the point—we’re just working those thinking muscles!  

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Confessions of a Toxic Tech Company

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Image of Twitter and Elon Musk's account with the new X logo
image via CNN

You’ve probably heard the news about Twitter—I’m sorry, the recently rebranded ‘X’—and everything Elon Musk is doing with the social media giant to, it seems, drive the company right into the ground. (For fun? For profit? In a fit of megalomaniacal spite? Who knows, but as someone without a Twitter account and zero stake in the game, it sure is fun to watch.)

Which got me thinking about the movie The Social Network and the toxic histories (to match the largely toxic climates) of so many social media companies.

On the one hand, it’s horrifying, considering how much of our information these companies have and the control they can exert on our lived reality (see: fake news, as just one example). On the other hand, it’s definitely entertaining to dive deep into the dramas surrounding all these companies.

In the spirit of that, here are some stories of toxic tech companies, the wild egos behind them, and what affect they have on our society, our minds, and our future.

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