Vol. 36, No. 2
June 2006

ESCAPING ARIZONA'S SUNSHINE

An article on ‘cool’ reading is a bit of a tradition for the June issue of this newsletter.  The idea is that those of us who spend the summer in Arizona can try to beat the heat by reading about places where the outside temperatures are a bit more agreeable.  So, this year, let’s head to Canada, our neighbor to the north.

We can start on the border, and on the Great Lakes, with Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals (RC47621), a history of maritime disasters on each of the lakes, including the famous 1975 wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  A couple of years later, in 1977, a young camper started off from Vancouver with a photographer and a dog and traveled by foot, snowshoe, toboggan and canoe all the way to the St. Lawrence River, living off the land for the two years it took to cross the country.  You can read all about it in Magnetic North: A Trek Across Canada (RC46965).  Terry Pindell had an easier time of it when he spent a year traveling across Canada by train, as described in Last Train to Toronto (RC35541).  We have a couple of books of essays about Canada and Canadians that cover a broad spectrum of topics, O Canada (RC35022) by Jan Morris and The Merry Heart (RC45506) by the novelist Robertson Davies.

For a bit of history, you could read about the dispersion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in the mid-eighteenth century in A Great and Noble Scheme (RC60603) by John Mack Faragher, or The Final Invasion (RC55591), which chronicles the British plan to recapture their former colonies in America during the War of 1812.  On the seamier side, there is Deadly Innocence (RC57265), a reconstruction of the Canadian ‘crime of the century’, in which a seemingly normal newlywed couple abduct, rape, torture and kill teenage girls.

For fictional crime, try City of Ice (RC50397), the story of Montreal being taken over by the Russian Mafia and the struggle of Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars to save his city.  In another mystery set in Montreal, a forensic anthropologist assists the authorities in investigating a biker feud that has left a trail of corpses (Deadly Decisions - RC51333).  The action switches to remote northern Ontario for When the Killing Starts (RC30347), in which a police chief is hired to locate a woman’s son, but the assignment turns deadly.  Even Jessica Fletcher makes a trip to Canada in Destination Murder (RC57727) and if Jessica is there, there’s bound to be a murder.

There are three suspense-filled novels that actually might raise the temperature a bit – Runway Zero-Eight (RC59882), an Arthur Hailey airliner-in-trouble story; Barometer Rising (RC48189), set in Halifax in 1917; and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (RC33968), the story of a young woman’s search for her missing father on a Quebec island.

For family stories you could try A Recipe for Bees (RC50556), the fictional reminiscence of a retired beekeeper in British Columbia, Crow Lake (RC59867), the story of a couple of young brothers in northern Ontario who give up their plans for higher education to stay home and raise their younger sisters after their parents die, In Spite of Killer Bees (RC54734), in which three unconventional sisters move to their late father’s hometown in Ontario after they inherit their grandfather’s house, or The Jade Peony (RC46958), the tale of a Chinese immigrant family living in Vancouver in the early 1940’s.

We hope your enjoy the trip to Canada, and remember, above all, stay cool.