The other day I wrote about the pair of Heinemann Classics I’ve read this year. Maybe you’ve seen their quintessential orange and black and white covers. They look a little like the vintage Penguins some people collect. But mostly I’ve been reading contemporary African writers. Sometimes, after Bill made
Growing up, reading was a solitary activity. Even when I was lucky enough to live near someone else who had a similar connection to books and stories, we never did that together: we played. We might swap books, under the best of circumstances, but we never had our own
The premise of this second story in Margaret Atwood’s new collection Old Babes in the Wood is that Nell is telling a story about two friends, John and François. “They’re dead now. A thing that happens increasingly: people die. This radiator incident took place in the early 1990s, when
Happy Week Two, MARM-ers. The clocks were turned back on the weekend, so it’s dark before five, but no snow quite yet. Most of the bigger trees have lost all their leaves but the sun is shining brightly this afternoon, while I’m munching on roasted pumpkin seeds and thinking
In November, Naomi and Sarah are hosting a readalong for The Story Girl, so the last time I packed up my bookbag, I stuck in my copy of Elizabeth Waterston’s Magic Island (2008) to read her chapter on L.M. Montgomery’s 1911 novel. Story Girl reads like a collection of
