For my birthday this year, Mr BIP arranged for me to have a cake with a sentence from an Alice Munro story iced onto it: “The world would be grand, if it weren’t for the people.” It’s an interesting quotation in a year when the pandemic has made everyone
Earlier this year, my Langston Hughes (1902-1967) reading (Part One, Part Two) was focussed more on his own writing. From his short stories to the first volume of his autobiography. But along the way, I’ve enjoyed a number of other books by and about him. “I should get Langston
Recently I found an old New Canadian Library copy of Mordecai Richler’s second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, originally published in 1955 (this copy a reprint from 1969), in a Little Free Library. When I find one of these tightly bound pocketbooks with their abstract, blotchy-arted covers second-hand,
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages. Mungi
I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan. Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the
