Link to Part 1 here.
Today (September 30th) is la Journée de la vérité et de la réconciliation, or the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. It honors the memory of thousands of Indigenous children who were taken from their families between 1867 and 1996 and sent to federally-run residential schools, where they were abused, neglected, and often died.… [Read More]
It seems that when you live in a certain place, you become the default consultants for tourism in that place. People contact you, sometimes on behalf of people you don’t even know, wanting to hear about the best restaurants or most exciting local experiences or whether the weather is weathering, etc.… [Read More]
Sadly, this post is late. The experiences in question happened during the Olympics, and would have been so much more appropriate to post then. But such is life.
I’d gone many times to Île Sainte Hélène, but I’d never been to the other island that includes portions of Parc Jean-Drapeau: Île Notre-Dame.… [Read More]
(If you didn’t see them, here are part 1, part 2, and part 3)
Since last working on this reading list, I’ve read an additional Heather O’Neill’s book and a handful more of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.… [Read More]
Sylvain and I went to the MTL Pride parade yesterday; it was a homegrown affair but with abundant color and music and smiles.
Here are a few photos and three short videos of an Irish-dancing rainbow, two-stepping white hats, and a good ol’ cheer squad going to town.… [Read More]
(If you didn’t see them, here are part 1 and part 2)
Jumping back to Mona Awad’s reading list, we’ll start with The Geography of Pluto, Christopher DiRaddo. You might think the story of a gay man breaking up with his ideal boyfriend and losing his mother to cancer would be awfully bleak, but this book manages to make the protagonist’s struggles with loss and grief into something oddly optimistic.… [Read More]
(This is a continuation of the Montreal Reading List, part 1).
In the last installment, I was using Mona Awad’s Reading List as a starting point for my own. So far, most of the authors and books mentioned were from the 1940s-1960s, and described the Montreal of those periods and earlier.… [Read More]
TW: racism and sexual predators (prison sentencing link)
Last month, the CBC ran this story about a Canadian woman sentenced to three years in prison for committing a unique kind of fraud: by falsifying birth information for her two daughters and claiming they had Indigenous heritage, she was able to access government funds earmarked for Indigenous people.… [Read More]
I’ve been meaning to write on the subject of fiction set in Montreal for quite a while. I’ve been trying to read as many books as I can that are set here.… [Read More]
A subtle cultural layer you discover in a new city is the locally-sourced humor, i.e. the local problems that are joked about by the people who live there. Per my post yesterday about the Grand Prix, Dan Ramos Comedy posted the above graphic on Reddit with the headline, “I Fixed the F1 Poster.”… [Read More]
