It began with an unreasonable number of books. (Doesn't it always?) I thought last year's list would be inspirational, but it hovered in the background, with other titles more insistent, and this year's OUAT reading has been a flurry of all-over-the-place fragments so far. I haven't finished anything yet, but
Towards the end of 2012, I was overwhelmed by the idea of being just one indie-minded reader in a literary world dominated by mega-publishers and mega-retailers, unsure how to affect change, how to respond to the sense of despair swelling within my reading heart and mind. I decided that making
In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains. Hoping that "readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they
So, first, there is the matter of 2012. That which came before. My spreadsheet lists 240 books, my GoodReads shelf 247 (it's an imperfect, yet perfectly bookish world) and I've updated the pages of Books Discussed and added a list of favourite titles. My reading year ended in a burst
Beginning with an arrival and ending with a departure, readers might think "Amundsen" a more conventionally told tale. Random House, 2012 (Thinking about the last story, "To Reach Japan", which began with a departure and ended with an arrival, I mean.) And, yet, both this arrival and departure
