'What to Read' - LIVE on location at McNally Robinson Booksellers!

Where better to start off "I Love to Read Month" than a bookstore? 

Classic 107 is live on location at McNally Robinson Booksellers Friday, February 2nd for the latest edition of "What to Read" with Chris Hall and Kathleen Friesen.

Don't forget to enter the "I Love to Read" contest -- a wonderful prize package put together by the folks at McNally for K-6 readers. We'll be visiting three lucky winning classrooms February 9, 16 and 23rd!

Learn more by listing to the conversation with Chris Hall! 

 

Visit McNally at one of their two stores in Winnipeg, Grant Park or The Forks second floor, or online at: www.mcnallyrobinson.com  

Hear the latest "What to Read" with Chris and Kathleen below! 
 

We were joined by a number of other McNally Robinson staff and asked them about what they love to read! 

 

Angela Torgerson, McNally Robinson Executive Manager

 

Josef Estabrooks, Children's Section Manager 

 

Joanna Graham, Community Classroom Manager

 

John Toews, Events Coordinator

 

Matthew Montgomery, Social Media Coordinator

 

Adam Araujo, Assistant Manager

 

Kathleen's picks: 

Tender Beasts by Liselle Sambury

After her private school is rocked by a gruesome murder, a teen tries to find the real killer and clear her brother's name in this psychological thriller perfect for fans of The Taking of Jake Livingston and Ace of Spades.

Sunny Behre has four siblings, but only one is a murderer.

With the death of Sunny's mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny's once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family's next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious note: "Take care of Dom."

The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny...and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge. Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother's dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother's simple request becomes a lot more complicated. Dom swears he's innocent, and although Sunny isn't sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder--made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another.

As Sunny and Dom work together to track down the culprit, Sunny realizes her other siblings have their own dark secrets. Soon she may have to choose: preserve the family she's always loved or protect the brother she barely knows--and risk losing everything her mother worked so hard to build.

 

The Wrong Book by Drew Daywalt

What if the narrator of the book you're reading is just...WRONG?! This hilarious book from the author of The Day the Crayons Quit will have you correcting what you're reading--and laughing!

Do bicycles say cock-a-doodle-doo? Do firefighters shout Ding Dong! before they put out a fire?

That's what the narrator of this hilarious picture book thinks! Good thing there are some other characters in this book to set him straight...

With bright bold illustrations, this laugh-out-loud funny story, written by the author of The Day the Crayons Quit, is sure to give kids--and grown-ups--a serious case of the giggles. 

Because a flower goes chugga-chugga-choo-choo. Right? Right?

 

Chris' picks: 

 

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
 

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian and The Financial Times

From "one of the most original minds in contemporary literature" (Nick Hornby) the bestselling and award-winning author of Golden Hill delivers a noirish detective novel set in the 1920s that reimagines how American history would be different if, instead of being decimated, indigenous populations had thrived.

Like his earlier novel Golden Hill, Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, now through the lens of a subtly altered 1920s--a fully imagined world full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly epic proportions, a troubled soul to fall in love with as you are swept along by a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot.

On a snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner find a body on the roof of a skyscraper. Down below, streetcar bells ring, factory whistles blow, Americans drink in speakeasies and dance to the tempo of modern times. But this is Cahokia, the ancient indigenous city beside the Mississippi living on as a teeming industrial metropolis, filled with people of every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that corpse on the roof will spark a week of drama in which this altered world will spill its secrets and be brought, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.

 

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

When a 10-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime, her family must face the truth about their past in this haunting, propulsive, psychologically keen story about class, trauma, and family secrets from "huge literary talent" (Karl Ove Knausgaard).

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples": the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

My Beloved Life by Amitava Kumar

An exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man's life, starting from his 1935 birth in a small village in India.

Jadunath Kunwar's beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. His mother, while pregnant, nearly dies from a cobra bite. And this is only the first of many challenges in store for Jadu. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He meets the sherpa who first summited Everest. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States--whose perspective sheds new light on Jadu.

All the while, currents of huge change sweep across India--from Independence to Partition, Gandhi to Modi, the Mahabharata to Somerset Maugham, cholera to covid--and buffet both Jadu and Jugnu's lives.

Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.