Three of these books were inspired by the conjunction between my own shelves and this year's Random House Bingo, which has a CanLit theme. The Tiger Claw filled my Nominated-for-the-Giller square, Evan Munday's second October Schwartz for the Mystery-or-Thriller square, and Elaine Lui's book about her relationship with her mother
Jon Chan Simpson invites readers into a world of "abductions, gunshots, commando dads, street-poet moms", a world populated by gangs and kidnapping conspiracies. "‘This thing - chinksta.’ She stumbled over the word, at first but pulled herself through it. ‘You’re worried this is all you got,’ she said. 'This is
Such good reading this summer, so far. In other respects, perhaps mine has not been the most productive summer. But it all depends what one puts on a to-do list, doesn't it! What if your to-do list was all about the books in your stacks? Little, Brown and Company, 2015
Phyllis Rose took a year to read Proust and wrote her "memoir in real time". More recently, Rebecca Mead revisited Middlemarch and she, too, wrote a memoir which examined her own life in that context. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, Nina Sankovitch plunged into the classic Russian's work as part
It's a familar theme in the Canadian landscape of letters, and it was also the topic of Adrienne Clarkson's recent Massey Lecture. "What does it mean to belong? And how do we belong? Who do we belong to?" These are the central ideas discussed in the series and they are
