“All of us are better when we are loved.” The film Reading Alistair MacLeod begins with this quotation. It’s a lovely way to summarize his oeuvre. In the film, Colm Tóibín speaks of the process of discovering MacLeod’s work through editing the Modern Library’s Best 200 Writers project; he
While I put the finishing touches on the pie-charts and calculations from 2020’s reading log, there are just a couple other books to talk about that I read (mostly) over the holiday break. Ruth Gilligan’s The Butchers’ Blessing (2020) is praised by two writers who snag my attention: Colum
Before I post about the new reading year, there are a few memorable reads from my 2020 log that I haven’t mentioned yet. Like Pourin’ Down Rain, Cheryl Foggo's memoir about growing up in 1960s Calgary, in a small and tight-knit Black community. When she was young, she heard
The call for witnesses in The Stone Diaries resonates throughout Shields’ work: “Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which is the
Rereading Cat’s Eye while rereading Rosemary Sullivan’s biography of Margaret Atwood emphasized the parallels between the narrator’s and author’s childhoods. I was a teenager when I read Cat’s Eye for the first time; I would have had no idea that Elaine’s childhood of lakes and insects was Peggy’s childhood
