Amy Lavender Harris’ Imagining Toronto Mansfield Press, 2010. I first visited Toronto when I was four years old; I fell in love with a park here, a park with wooden forts in which you could climb to their very tops. If you were four years old, or, at least, small.
As if it wasn't enough to obsess about Reading and ReLi-ting, I'm also obsessing about the Toronto Book Award, whose shortlist was announced this week. THE 2011 TORONTO BOOK AWARD (More deets here.) What Disturbs Our Blood, James FitzGerald (Random House) Étienne's Alphabet, James King (Cormorant Books) The Amazing Absorbing
Doris McCarthy’s Ninety Years Wise Second Story Press, 2004 This is another book that I discovered thanks to Shelagh Rogers’ The Next Chapter. You know how sometimes you hear a name so many times and you keep meaning to investigate and then, suddenly, something happens and it shifts from a
Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion Knopf, 1987 I first read this as a teenager. I’d already been reading a lot of adult literature, even if I was still regularly re-reading childhood favourites like the Anne books and still discovering some classics like K.M. Peyton’s Flambards stories and
It was a bitterly cold, blustery day in January 2003. I started reading the book at my desk, which was under the eaves next to a small window. There was a small space heater humming near my feet because the walls up there were cold to the touch, and the
