The first episode of the Canada Reads is today and I have finished three of the books, I am more than half way through “The Game” and I have not been able to get my hands on “The Cold Road”.

I liked “The Tiger”. The story under discussion would, if written succinctly, take up no more than twenty pages without missing any details. The book discusses many other aspects from the nature of the Russian Far East to history of modern hunting and effects of poverty. The result is the book that is equally fascinating and annoying. It reads something like this:

“The hunters have been tracking the tiger for days. They saw him and he was about to pounce. Before I tell you what happens next, let me spend five or six pages on Sino-Russian politics over the last hundred years.”

Can you say choppy narrative? Despite being choppy, the discussion is well placed and the author definitely manages to paint a picture very successfully. Good read though the narrator intrudes much more than I would wish.