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Mark’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Mark’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Mark Lisac’s Followers (37)
2,661 books
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46 friends
47 books
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3 friends
181 books
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13 friends
1,623 books
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125 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
...more
Member Since
September 2008
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Mark Lisac
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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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Lois Hole Speaks: Words that Matter (University of Alberta Centennial Series)
by
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published
2004
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2 editions
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Image Decay
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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 it was ok
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| Wanted to give it a fair chance despite much of the conclusion being given away in a page-and-a-half chapter that starts the book. Saw no reason to spend more time on it after getting to Pg. 100. It's a slow-paced effort with characters that feel lik ...more | |
"2.5
A bit of a mediocre and forgettable book. It relied too much on conventions, and so the story and the characters felt very predictable and flat, at certain points even stereotypical. I also think that the side characters were severly under-used. D" Read more of this review » |
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Oct 11, 2025 10:52AM
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Mark Lisac
rated a book liked it
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| The main theme is a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl story; Buddy Holly did it more memorably in a two-minute and three-second song called It Doesn't Matter Anymore. Started out pretty good, then progressively left me wondering at how the story could j ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book liked it
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| A 3.5-star effort. I've rounded down because almost all the people Lew Archer ends up talking to are implausibly willing to talk to him, and give him half-honest or quarter-honest answers, despite his asking intrusive personal questions within a few ...more | |
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Mark Lisac
rated a book liked it
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| An interesting but often frustrating book that has all the charms and drawbacks of a wildly overgrown garden. It begins strongly. The first one-quarter to one-third is written with a marvellous natural eloquence. Then it careens across various digres ...more | |
"By the time I'm halfway through a book, I can usually tell what I'm going to think of it – whether it's going to be a fun-but-flawed throwaway read I'll forget in a couple of weeks (three stars) or a wonderful new favourite (five, obviously) or somet"
Read more of this review »
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Mark Lisac
and
9 other people
liked
Ian's review
of
Quartered Safe Out Here: A powerful wartime autobiography and historical account:
"3.2⭐
The book is the Second World War memoir of the novelist George MacDonald Frazer, author of the Flashman stories. It's well written, often funny, mostly honest ( I think) and very unapologetic. Frazer is clearly proud of his part in the brutal Bur" Read more of this review » |
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“… 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
