Jaz

https://www.goodreads.com/jagal

Jaz’s Bookshelves

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Jaz is Currently Reading

Jaz is currently reading

The Croning

by Laird Barron (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

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17 hours, 44 min ago

Jaz is currently reading

I, Robot (Robot, #0.1)

by Isaac Asimov

bookshelves: science-fiction-androids-robots, currently-reading

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— May 04, 2026 05:18PM

Apr 26, 2026 04:07PM

Jaz is currently reading

The Knowing

by Tanya Talaga

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in April 2026

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Jaz said: " An Elder once shared with me, “You were created two wombs ago.” For, when our mother is in utero, she already has all the eggs she will carry for her entire life, and we are one of them. And so, we are not only carried in our mother’s womb, but our g An Elder once shared with me, “You were created two wombs ago.” For, when our mother is in utero, she already has all the eggs she will carry for her entire life, and we are one of them. And so, we are not only carried in our mother’s womb, but our grandmother’s.

As beautiful as this is, and as much as I loved my own grandmother, when I knew her, I never knew my great-grandmother. I never met her. The focal point of much of The Knowing is Tanya Talaga’s search for Annie, her great-GREAT-grandmother. A woman she “mourns” — and often. Annie had a tragic life; like so many Indigenous women, she was incarcerated against her will. In her early years, at a Residential School; in her Elder years, at an asylum.

Funnily, my great-grandmother was also an Annie. I’ve only ever seen photographs of her. I can’t say I’ve ever mourned her. How can you mourn someone you’ve never known, and therefore never lost?

While my Annie also endured her fair share of tragedy — including having her children taken from her by Indian Agents, and watching them lose their connection to her language, Anishinaabemowin, and their culture, Talaga’s hyperbolic intergenerational yearning had me eye rolling for a fair amount of this memoir. We get it. The past is sad. Losing your connection to your culture/community is sad. But don’t pretend you’ve sat there weeping for a woman whose womb you never even sat in, even as an egg. A woman who was born in 1870. Two hundred years before you.

I am throughly enjoying the historical parts of this book. I’ve learned some incredibly interesting things, such as how the Hudson and James Bay were “discovered,” and how New York’s Wall Street got its name.

Another reviewer mentioned that Talaga’s journalistic/historic sections are her strongest, and I agree. When it turns back into a memoir/hunt for Annie, it waxes poetic (and not in the greatest way) and often leans on conjecture or imagination rather than fact. This is partly because Talaga knows incredibly little about her great-great-grandmother (Annie was 10 years old in 1881) and because the resources Talaga is using are scant in detail. This conjecture falls into hyperbole fairly often. Upon discovering one of her ancestors was a “servant” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, for example, Talaga concludes he experienced an “element of unfree or forced labour” (p 111). Quite bold to conclude your ancestor was a slave, when all you’re going off is one word — one that is used in many contexts. These sections definitely rubbed me the wrong way. For a journalist, her use of “facts” was very, very liberal.

(This review is ongoing; I’ve yet to finish this book, but Goodreads won’t let me draft a review in the small notes progress stage.) ...more "

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(50%)
— May 11, 2026 06:13AM

Apr 20, 2026 06:31AM · see review

Jaz’s Quotes

“When the curtain falls no one is ready”
― Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm

8 likes

“give me laugh lines and wrinkles i want proof of the jokes we shared engrave the lines into my face like the roots of a tree that grow deeper with each passing year i want sunspots as souvenirs for the beaches we laid on i want to look like i was never afraid to let the world take me by the hand and show me what it’s made of i want to leave this place knowing i did something with my body other than trying to make it look perfect”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

2 likes

“Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

tags: humour

278 likes