June's edition of 'What to Read' with McNally Robinson Booksellers

It’s starting to look and feel a lot more summery out there in Winnipeg.

Whether it’s in anticipation of days spent at the beach or curled up indoors on the couch, a new book is always a good idea for the warmer months. 

Thankfully, on the first Friday of June, Chris Hall of McNally Robinson Booksellers returned to the Classic 107 studio with his latest picks in "What to Read!"

 

 

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Bear by Julia Phillips

Sam and Elena dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can't earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.

Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it's time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the desire to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.

A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us--and within us--Bear is a propulsive, mythical, richly imagined novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.

 

Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan

Campbell Flynn, art historian and biographer of Vermeer, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public-yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. Entangled with a brilliant student, he begins to see trouble brewing for his family and friends. All his worlds collide-the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet-as dangerous forces enter his life and Caledonian Road gives up its secrets.

Andrew O'Hagan has written a social novel in the Victorian style, drawing a whole cast of characters into company with each other and revealing the inner energies of the way we live now.

 

Parade by Rachel Cusk 

Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. The attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a woman dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they have inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character and plot to tell a true story--about art, family, morality, gender and how we compose ourselves. A writer and a visionary like no other, Rachel Cusk turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

 

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

 

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World by Andrea Di Robilant

In the autumn of 1550, a thick volume containing a wealth of geographical information new to Europeans, with startling wood-cut maps of Africa, India and Indonesia, was published in Venice under the title Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). The editor of this remarkable collection of travelogues, journals and classified government reports remained anonymous. Two additional volumes delivered the most accurate information on Asia and the "New World" available at the time. The three volumes together constituted an unparalleled release of geographical data into the public domain. It was, Andrea di Robilant writes, the biggest Wikileak of the Renaissance.

In This Earthly Globe, di Robilant brings to life the palace intrigues, editorial wheedling, delicate alliances and vibrant curiosity that resulted in this coup by the editor Giovambattista Ramusio. Learned and self-effacing, he gathered a vast array of both popular and closely guarded narratives, from the journals of Marco Polo (he fact-checked them!) to detailed reports on Northern African cultures from the Muslim scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Mohammad al-Wazzan (later known as Leo Africanus). Diverse voices spill out from these chapters as di Robilant recounts how Ramusio pursued the sources, and how he understood both the darker episodes of "exploration" involving colonial violence and the voyage stories which included accounts of people from African and Asian lands, who had a great deal to share about their cultures. The result is a far-flung and delightful homage to one of the founding fathers of modern geography.