May tallies something like this: 24 books (including verse, graphic novels, and kidlit), 2 magazines, assorted stories, 2 cookbooks, and a picture book (Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till). (Surely I’m not the only person who has trouble keeping track now that there are notebooks and files to update?)
I am fond of specific Alice Munro collections: A Friend of My Youth because it was my first, Open Secrets because it was the impetus for a particularly good book club discussion some years ago, and Runaway. McClelland & Stewart, 2004 Runaway because I have a memory of reading it
As an only child, my fascination with large families in fiction stretches back to the Marches, the Moffats and the All-of-a-Kinds. More recently, Jennifer Close's The Smart One and Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins catapulted me into chaotic family-soaked gatherings (the latter was one of my favourite reads in 2013). Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group,
"Food and hot tea lift my spirits." So says Nora Porteous, who has returned to her family home in Australia, a “wretched and slothful old woman”. 1978; Penguin Books, 1984 Well, some might think her so. Wretched. Slothful. Old. At least, she muses that it's possible. But Nora works against
"One day we were driving around in the country not too far from where we live, and we found a road we hadn't known about." Random House, 2012 He is eighty-three and she is seventy-one: there has been some discussion of death. (There has been some discussion of
