Even though I should have known better, I started to read Miriam Toews’ new novel, Fight Night, shortly before bed and then stayed up to finish it. Because Shiv’s voice is irresistible and the story of life with her grandmother and her mother was so hilarious and moving. But
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
This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.* What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library
