"I've always conceived of language as music," says Tomson Highway: musician, playwright, novelist. "I play Chopin still, but in Cree," he continues. Then, more than a decade later, it is as though he continues this conversation, in A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance. This slim volume is subtitled on "Imagining Multilingualism", which
The first volume of his Toronto trilogy introduces readers to Bernice Leach, who has left Barbados to work in Toronto as a housekeeper in an upscale neighbourhood in the 1960s. She has left behind a son and his father, as well as a mother and a sister, and she is
For the past couple of weeks, I have been listening to Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce on my daily walks. I was walking in full summer, listening to descriptions of winter in Moose Factory in Northern Ontario. The clusters of cloud in the story were from the exhaust of snowmobiles in
Is it too much? Or, just enough. What am I to make of this final story in my Alice Munro reading project. (I read her last collection, Dear Life, in 2012.) While rereading Too Much Happiness, I was constantly aware of the references to being happy, to happiness, in the
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
