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Mark’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mark’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Mark Lisac’s Followers (39)
2,672 books
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46 friends
47 books
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3 friends
183 books
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13 friends
1,634 books
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123 friends
Mark Lisac
Goodreads Author
Born
in Hamilton, ON, Canada
Website
Twitter
Genre
Influences
Tries not to imitate other writers. Admires too many to list. Besides
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Member Since
September 2008
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Where the Bodies Lie
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Red Hill Creek
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published
2021
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2 editions
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Alberta Politics Uncovered: Taking Back Our Province
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published
2004
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Dream Home
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The Klein Revolution
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published
1995
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Image Decay
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Lois Hole Speaks: Words that Matter (University of Alberta Centennial Series)
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published
2004
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2 editions
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The Red Car
Something reminded me today of the 1954 Don Stanford novel titled The Red Car. I read it probably when I was somewhere between 10 and 13 years old. As happened with other boys of that era — you can see the evidence in reviews on Goodreads and Amazon — it influenced my life forever. The book tells the story of a 16-year-old who restores a somewhat wrecked 1948 MG TC. He has help from a foreign-trai
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Mark’s Recent Updates
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Mark Lisac
rated a book really liked it
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| A 3.5-star dilemma. Should I have rounded down to 3 stars because: the opening pages sound as immature as Murdoch said in later life the book was; because the narrator, Jake Donaghue, is frustrating and sometimes insufferable and usually a living dem ...more | |
"Under the Net, from 1954, was the first published novel by Iris Murdoch, the distinguished academic, and professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. As well as books on moral philosophy she wrote twenty-six critically acclaimed novels, one of"
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Mark Lisac
rated a book really liked it
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| Humour, compassion, some adventure, a nicely built structure, knowing glimpses of addled teenage minds flailing toward rationality. What's not to like? Let's see: it's probably longer than it needs to be; it becomes repetitious; not all the jokes wor ...more | |
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"this is super weird and sad because i adore frederik backman but i just did not like this book. it felt like it was trying so hard to be this profound thing and like sure some of it was but a lot of it just had me extremely cringed out. i will not be"
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"Look, no one is more surprised than me at this rating. I am an avid fan of Fredrik Backman’s work. I even read his Instagram captions and chuckle occasionally. All the same, I have ambivalent feelings about this one.
My Friends is a story about art an" Read more of this review » |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book it was amazing
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| Clearly the work of a master storyteller from the first page. The whole collection reflects typical Rushdie effects: delightfully inventive writing; demonstrated knowledge of India, England, and North America; fairly sudden shifts between the chatty ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book liked it
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| A sort of National Debt for Dummies. Full of bullet points, sections of boldface type, and advice on which parts of which chapters you can feel free to skip if so inclined. Also full of statements that sound obvious or well known, dressed up as major ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book really liked it
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| A puzzle mystery that's structured unlike any mystery I've read before, although the form is apparently popular in Japan. The novelty made it an enjoyable excursion. Not sure how many more of these I'd want to read, though. This one had ups and downs ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book liked it
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| Makes some useful points, and it's interesting to see how her comments about the U.S. toward the end of the first Trump presidency highlight tendencies that have become amplified in the second, but it leaves a strong impression of being unfocused and ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book it was amazing
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| Havel wrote this in the context of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination in the 1970s. It still speaks to the world today. He essentially explained why inhuman political systems cannot survive forever controlling ordinary people. But that belief dep ...more | |
“… and poured libations out to the everlasting gods who never die — to Athena first of all, the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-grey eyes — and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn" (R. Fagles translation)”
― The Odyssey
― The Odyssey
“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”
― The Great Gatsby
― The Great Gatsby
“If there is a moral in this book, it is not my fault. If there is social relevance, it crept in without alerting me, in which case I would have hit it with a stick." (from preface to a later edition of the novel)”
― Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse
― Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
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“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences: in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
― Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
― Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
