Before I settled on some other reading projects for 2020 (more on that tomorrow), I entertained the possibility of making a simpler goal than usual: choosing half of my reading from my own shelves and half from the library’s shelves. The idea being that I have tended to read
There are three things that I noticed in this rereading of The Handmaid’s Tale. The use of time in the narrative. The importance of what is not said. The matter of world-building and perspective. In all three, readers are wholly engaged. Engaged in the use of time, in the
When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a teenager. In a few years, I would start to keep records about my reading: a log and handwritten (or typed( passages that I favoured along the way. The log in a notebook (usually practical rather than pretty) and the
Ian Williams landed in my stack with his longlisting for the ReLit Award in 2011. This is why I read prizelists: they encourage me to read in different directions, when left to my own devices, I sometimes plod along, in familiar reading territory, simply out of habit. The title
"Who is Robertson Davies? It's a fair question." This is how Val Ross opens her review in The Globe & Mail on September 28, 1991. "After all, she continues, "Davies begins most of his novels with a question or a mystery, including the latest,
