A Minor Chorus | 
pickSuperb. The eminently frustrating part of reading an author with such a way with words is not being able to convey your admiration in as worthy terms! The characters are searingly alive, yet subtle portraits of struggle, their stories, strains making up the minor chorus, are a mix of heartbreaking and hopeful, joyful, clear testaments, analogues of the realities of Indigenous experience in what is called Canada. 1/?
“...to insist on a form of gender that wasn't a natural disaster but rather a sprawling field where nothing was a coffin someone could fall into.“
DAMN. Again, the way Belcourt uses words leaves me stunned wordless in appreciation.
Belcourt, man. 👏🏻 He says such relatable things in such an eloquent and original fashion. You recognize it as a thought pulled from your brain, but know you'd never have the words to say it the way he does. 🤌🏻
pickThis is an experimental novel / not really a novel by western conventional standards, as it is just as much academic theorizing as a narrative. On the sentence level I found a lot to love here, BRB is such an amazing wordsmith/poet. As a piece of fiction this is a meandering collection of conversations and throughts that ask questions and broach topics w/ no answers or resolutions. If you like that kind of thing + smart poetic writing, read this.
pickBilly-Ray Belcourt is an award-winning queer poet, memoirist & essayist from Driftpile Cree Nation in northern Alberta. His deeply philosophical experimental debut novel is about how individual lives are inevitably shaped by community and by larger social, political and historical forces. #LGBTQ #Indigenous #CanadianAuthor
After he left, when I was alone in a throbbing silence, I thought: Maybe I‘m predisposed to being a writer because I radiate emotion so openly.
I‘ve been trained to see the novel as this capacious and possibly dissident form for the articulation of social life. I‘ve been thinking: What if I wrote one myself? I‘d reach a larger audience. I could represent the lives of queer and Cree people without the constraints of scholarly norms.
pickThis was great! Not a traditional novel, more of a character study or a study of place. I liked the interview style narrative linking the bigger conversations together
pickLyrical, poetic, & often philosophical, Belcourt‘s novel debut (he‘s a published poet) tells the story of a queer Indigenous graduate student who steps away from his PhD program to write a novel. This is a story about identity, belonging, whether or not any accommodation can be reached between a system/institution/tool of oppression & the people it oppresses & much more. Complex, compelling & definitely thought-provoking. Recommended.
Booktube: Friday Reads September 30: National Day of Truth & Reconciliation; #Giller shortlist; #audiobooks #LGBTQ #IndigenousBooks #CanLit #ShadowGiller2022 #MiddleGradeFiction
https://youtu.be/hKOKSC_xcAQ
pick5☆ Billy-Ray Belcourt is going to break your heart with this book, let him. Longlisted for the Giller Prize, A MINOR CHORUS is a hauntingly beautiful piece of auto-fiction. An exploration of storytelling, language, colonialism, place, history, grief, lonliness, family, ordinary life, and most of all survival. Anything I say here will not be enough, it wont capture the absolute heart of this work. I was truly moved to my core. #bookreview
Children of an invisible war are essentially ghosts.
(Internet photo taken at a Residential School)
A novel is a body of water from which I frantically wanted to drink. What, I wondered, would a novel attuned to rising sea levels & melting Arctic ice sheets look like? What would be its structure? Would the words grow paler & paler as the story progressed, until what was left was a stick figure or sentence drowning in the corner of a blank page?
pickShould this book make the #Giller Shortlist (which I fully expect) dare I say it could very well be the winner? I say this after only reading 4 of the 14 on the Longlist. #ShadowGiller @Lindy
It is difficult to live in a world that corrodes freedom.
Next up for #ShadowGiller reading. @Lindy
@shawnmooney and I chat about the 2022 Giller longlist #CanLit #IndigenousBooks #booktube #GillerPrize #ShadowGiller2022
https://youtu.be/rofLiTmumZo
The last three books I‘ve won from Goodreads giveaways
6mo