January 18, 2026 · 5:32 pm

Book of Dust Book One – La Belle Sauvage

I enjoyed Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (book one of the Book of Dust triology) – at least the first third when Malcolm is getting hooked in to the mysterious elements of dust, of factions vying for control, of trying to sort out how a baby, Lyra, might fit into it all.

Once the flood comes (spoiler, there’s a flood) the story turns into a quest narrative of trying to get through the various and sundry challenges between them and safety (think Odysseus trying to get home). I found everything from this point on less satisfying – like it felt like it was just trying to draw out a whole book? that everything that needed to be conveyed could have just been explained without them having to wander to different worlds or face various challenges/monsters – maybe because the characters (Malcolm and Alice) didn’t develop much through these challenges (except for a budding romance, which again, could have been conveyed without ‘and now! a giant to exchange riddles with!’). Not that I’m against quest narratives – give me The Hobbit any day – just that this one felt like an exercise in wasting time rather than doing anything substantive for character, plot or theme.

Was I annoyed enough not to read book two? Yes. Might a 12 year old have a difference experience of reading this one? Absolutely. So if you were into the Golden Compass series (this one is a prequel) or you have a different tolerance for Adventure For The Sake of Adventure then by all means: go in.

(also realizing nearly 20 years in (!) that I don’t have a category for ‘fantasy’. oops).

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January 9, 2026 · 2:18 am

Dream Count: Some parts are brilliant

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count has some spectacular sections (and you sense in there the corollary that there are some that just draaaag).

Following the interconnected lives of friends/relatives Chimaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou – Nigerian expats living in America (or Nigera but with some time in America) – the book explores their lives before/during/after the pandemic. How their romantic relationships, jobs, friends and family shape their sense of themselves and the possibilities for their lives – and certainly how access to money makes and limits choices. I found the section following Kadiatou utterly gripping, beautiful in its writing, heartbreaking and enraging. Honestly the whole book could have been her section as a short story and I’d have been just as happy. Plus a few of the descriptions Chimaka has of why she fell in love with the different lovers she has – and how much insecurity drove early decisions in her romantic life (and how she eventually discovers the essential value of loving yourself first and Boy Did That Resonate).

So while I loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun – in the end I’m lukewarm on Dream Count. I’d tell you to get it, read Chimaka’s section then skip ahead for Kadiatou’s section and then call it a day.

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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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December 26, 2025 · 9:28 pm

The Black Wolf: I hate to say a bad word about Louise Penny, but.

I usually just say I love Louise Penny for the comforting and cute the Gamache mysteries. But I have to say The Black Wolf is pretty bad. Ack, it feels like such a betrayal to say so. But it is – a plot that doesn’t really hang together and/or is so hard to follow that you can’t be bothered, characters that are so underdeveloped they have to continually be reintroduced as ‘the one who Gamache is responsible for ruining’ or ‘the one who Gamache hates because he ruined his son’ etc, and an effort at being Relevant so ham-fisted and obvious (the Americans are coming for Canada) that you just can’t stop being annoyed the whole time you’re reading it. Like really – nothing much in this book that I’d recommend – it’s even short on the usually fantastic descriptions of casseroles and croissants.

I know you’ll probably read it – if the waiting list at the library or the tables inside Chapters are any indication – because there’s something about a familiar and comforting series that is hard to resist, but if I were you (and what am I doing here if not giving you unsolicited book reading advice) I’d absolutely skip it in favour of just about anything else.

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