Faithful Readers
We are meeting online! You are welcome to join us.
If you would like to be part of the online gathering and discussion, please email or call the church office and we’ll add you to the list.
Email secretary@harrowunited.ca or call the church office (204) 284-0079 to be included.
Zoom Meetings 1:30-3:30pm unless otherwise posted
Click here to download the reading list
Next: October 27, 2021: ‘The Testaments’ by Margaret Atwood
Presenter: Karen C.
When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her–freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
November 24, 2021: ‘Truth Be Told’ by Beverley McLachlin
Presenter: Priti S.
Special Guest: Beverley McLachlin will join us via Zoom
Former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Beverley McLachlin offers an intimate and revealing look at her life, from her childhood in the Alberta foothills to her career on the Supreme Court, where she helped to shape the social and moral fabric of the country—for readers of Educated and Becoming.
TBD: January 26, 2021: ‘The Dharma of the Princess Bride’ (Movie) by Ethan Nichtern
Presenter: Mary R.
Humorous yet spiritually rigorous in the tradition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh, drawing from pop culture and from personal experience, The Dharma of “The Princess Bride” teaches us how to understand and navigate our most important personal relationships from a twenty-first-century Buddhist perspective.
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January 26, 2022: ‘The Pull of the Stars’ by Emma Donaghue
Presenter: Mary R.
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the great flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and Room.
February 23, 2022: ‘How to Pronounce Knife’ by Souvankham Thammvongsa
Presenter: Teresa M.
A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he”ll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to belong.
March 30, 2022: ‘Educated’ by Tara Westoven
Presenter: Cecile R.
Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school.
April 27, 2022: ‘The Paris Apartment’ by Kelly Bowen
Presenter: Rae L.
Set seventy-five years apart, against a perilous and a prosperous Paris, both Estelle and Lia must summon hidden courage as they navigate the dangers of a changing world, altering history—and their family’s futures—forever.
May 25, 2022: ‘Butter Honey Pig Bread’ by Francesca Ekwuyasi
Presenters: Dianne B. /Karen C.
Spanning three continents, Butter Honey Pig Bread tells the interconnected stories of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Kambirinachi believes that she is an Ogbanje, or an Abiku, a non-human spirit that plagues a family with misfortune by being born and then dying in childhood to cause a human mother misery. She has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family but lives in fear of the consequences of her decision.
Windup Dinner at 6 pm with book recommendations
September 28, 2022: ‘The House by the Lake’ by Thomas Harding
Presenters: Dorothy F. /Susan K.
In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been a holiday home for her and her family, but in the 1930s, she had been forced to flee to England as the Nazis swept to power. Nearly twenty years later, the house was government property and soon to be demolished. It was Harding’s legacy, one that had been loved, abandoned, fought over-a house his grandmother had desired until her death. Could it be saved? And should it?
October 26, 2022: ‘Broken Circle: the Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools’ by Theodore Fontaine
Presenter: Shirley M.
Theodore (Ted) Fontaine lost his family and freedom just after his seventh birthday, when his parents were forced to leave him at an Indian residential school by order of the Roman Catholic Church and the Government of Canada. Twelve years later, he left school frozen at the emotional age of seven. He was confused, angry and conflicted, on a path of self-destruction. At age 29, he emerged from this blackness. By age 32, he had graduated from the Civil Engineering Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and begun a journey of self-exploration and healing.
In this powerful and poignant memoir, Ted examines the impact of his psychological, emotional and sexual abuse, the loss of his language and culture, and, most important, the loss of his family and community. He goes beyond details of the abuses of Native children to relate a unique understanding of why most residential school survivors have post-traumatic stress disorders and why succeeding generations of First Nations children suffer from this dark chapter in history.
Told as remembrances described with insights that have evolved through his healing, his story resonates with his resolve to help himself and other residential school survivors and to share his enduring belief that one can pick up the shattered pieces and use them for good.
Now an approved curriculum resource for grade 9–12 students in British Columbia and Manitoba.