Book review: City of glass

City of glass is a book written by a Canadian author Douglas Copland. He wrote his hometown Vancouver with full of love. It is a good short essay collection with beautiful pictures, which can be a good guide book for the local culture. I heard of this book in a book review program 5 years ago, and it was introduced by a host I loved. But during that time, I did not find this book because it was published in 2000 and there was no digital version online. Last month, coincidently, I found this book is available in centennial college’s library, and I was just finished a trip ofVancouver, so without hesitation, I borrowed it.

The book is quite easy to read and I can feel the writer has very good writing skills. It was quite like the writer is companying you side by side to walk around the city. He is friendly and knowledgeable, as a guest, you will like his witty narrating and let him lead you to his memory and nowadays comparison. The sentences in his book, shown a great observation and vocabulary about colours. In his book he wrote,“The sky in Vancouver has its own distinct tinge, just like London or LosAngeles-a milky grey colour that melts onto the steel blue mountain slopes.When watching TV movies, locals can almost always spot the ones filmed here simply because of the quality of the light.”(Coupland, 2000)

Another beautiful description is the paragraphs in the Vancouver ferries them. He wrote that “Seagulls love ferries,too, and much fun can be had with a plate of French fries, tossing them up into the air into their beaks. The gulls fly at the same speed as the ferry, thus making them seem motionless. Then the other gulls catch on and it gets really brutal as they bite each other’s feet, all to get your French fries.” It is a piece of successful description, when I red this I felt that I was just in the scene. Acutely,it is very familiar scene for me too, but after I imagined that how I can write it, I found I could not use variable vocabulary to delivery the personality about them. After read his book, I have a better understanding about how to select the words and how to writing. And I felt visualization is really a good way for me, and it will be helpful if I could apply theme in my writing process.

Writing is not a big thing, but writing in a good way is a long road to go, maybe a lifelong road.