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
What is it about the Australian Text Classics list that’s so appealing? The North York branch of the Toronto Public Library has quite a few of them, including Elizabeth Harrower’s The Long Prospect (1958) which I’m happy to read for Brona’s Books Australian Reading Month. What I enjoyed about
Dirty Work by Eyal Press (2021) landed in my stack following an interview with the New York Times Book Review editor. Its subtitle—Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America—summarizes the content aptly, but doesn’t express how un-put-down-able I found this book. Most of the time, when
Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves. In the opening story of
The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways. In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption. (My laugh came out more
