“If prison isn’t prison, the outside world has no meaning!” So says Aurora to Charmaine in Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Heart Goes Last. McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (Penguin Random House) It dates back, the CanLit icon's interest in imprisonment, a preoccupation with the idea of lives which
Our young separatist narrator is imagining his own future and the future of Quebec, and both man and nation are struggling with matters of expression and independence, in Hubert Aquin's Next Episode (published in 1965, translated by Sheila Fischman in 2001). “I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its
From my discovery of Neil Bantock's Griffin and Sabine books, I have sought out books that play with form. (Even earlier, I fell hard for Anastasia Krupnik's To-Do lists which appeared as handwritten notes on lined paper in Lois Lowry's books.) Recently, Kim Belair's and Ariadne MacGillivray's Pure Steele (2013) struck
In the past, I've made large stacks of creepy reading with the RIP challenges in mind, but I have a habit of stacking up many lovely possibilities but then choosing different books altogether later on. Perhaps this is partly because books can surprise you and take you in unexpected directions.
The majority of my reading time this year has been devoted to the books which have been living for years, though neglected, on my own bookshelves. In May and June, I had a planned rebellion, and I enjoyed a great number of new books. But now I have returned to
