October 25, 2026 · 4:26 pm

Partita: I wanted to love it so much

I LOVED Demon Copperhead. Like have waxed endlessly about it, given it as a gift, recommended it over and over. And so when I got gifted (thanks, B.) a copy of Partita I was so excited. Imagine me skipping my way to the bath with a glass of wine and this book just certain I would come out wrinkled and changed.

And oh the writing IS beautiful, and there are descriptions I wanted to clip out and send around the world for the quality of writing is just spectacular, and reason alone to read it.

But the story? I don’t know. Maybe my expectations were too high (they were almost certainly too high) but the whole things just read as a… so what? or like, really? you let this one love story of your 20s rule your life this long? And sure, there’s a not so subtle theme of how we ‘hoard’ things, stories, ideas about ourself and that in this holding too tight limit our acceptance and love of the life, things, people we actually have. So maybe it was more than this love story – rich as it was in its telling – wasn’t believable enoguh for the resonance and impact it wrought on our protagonist?

And for music lovers there’s much to love in here about the telling of the pianist on her way to international fame and the suffering and struggle that it takes to be That Good (and I did, really, love the suggested musical pairings for different chapters and was happy, truly, to bring more Chopin into my daily life).

And yet, it couldn’t help but have stark comparison with Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake which has the same theme of young artist ruined by love who must life the rest of their lives wondering about the kind of life they could have had if they had followed (or in this case been able to follow) their art to it’s fullest degree. And it pains me, PAINS ME, to say Patchett did it better.

So while I started Partita with all the eagerness of a favourite novelist’s new book, by the end I was just ready for it to be over, not convinced I had encountered any new idea or view onto the world, though I had spent time with some of the best writing you’ll come across. So separate form and content maybe? Or know that the story itself is Just Okay, and the writing remains spectacular.

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October 25, 2026 · 4:17 pm

Jacob Have I Loved: Young Adult Fiction is For Adults, Too

Katherine Paterson is probably (?) best known for Bridge to Terebitha, but I recommend you to Jacob Jacob I Loved, too. Particularly if you have some sense that your life is fated and you have no choice but to Do What You Are Doing. Here’s a book – for young people, for old people, for people-people – that brings to attention the way we choose, or might be able to choose, or choose despite our constraints, the kind of person we want to be and the life we want to live.

In this case we follow twin sisters where one, Caroline, is spectacularly precious and adored, and the other, Sara Louise, who – well, let’s admit that the limited narration might open questions about its reliability – isn’t. And how Sara finds around her evidence of a narrative of who she thinks she is and what she can become, ever believing this to be true and letting this story limit what she will let herself imagine for her life or for her capabilities. And so the book through the (eventual) shifting of this self narration shows the young adult reader the power of the story we tell about ourselves. That to be who we want to become a big part of it is is declaring who we think we can and could be.

It runs up, of course, against the usual ‘choice amid constraints’ without ignoring these – Sara Louise, in choosing her future, has to make sacrifices of family and future that her parents may have wanted, choices that come with economic repercussions, and significantly, force her to see the ways she has externalized her own sense of limitation. So yes, we can’t choose to be anything we want, or can’t choose anything without consequence, but, the book says, we have more choices than we imagine.

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October 25, 2026 · 4:07 pm

The Things We Never Say: Ooooof

It’s hard to choose among my favourite authors, and maybe a Favourite favourite isn’t necessary, but boy does Elizabeth Strout make a strong case for being my Favourite. I saved this one for a weekend when I knew I needed a book to keep me and it doesn’t fail in this promise.

Following Artie Strout in his years of teaching high school, in his discoveries about himself and his family, his desire to die and then to live, and the small moments throughout it all that make Strout unrivalled in being so spectacular. The book deals a devastating blow midway through (and in a parenthetical aside, no less) that let’s the form do what the theme is insisting: that the things, the people, the moments that shake and shatter your life are rarely those that you Expect in a Big Way, but are rather the things you didn’t see coming excpet sideways, or happened so quietly you didn’t realize they were going to resonate quite so much, or are when someone pulls you aside and bam hits you with information that tilts everything you thought you knew.

From a family of educators it was also a book about the impact and beauty of teaching. And as a student who still – often – thinks with such gratitude of the teachers that shaped me in ways they probably also thought of as parenthetical to the rest of their work, it is a book that reminds us all of the influence we wield, whether we recognize it as such or not.

And a book about believing – against all odds and evidence in this moment – that people can be more than their worst moments. That we might all, somehow, be able to come out of our current set of interlocking crisis if only we could do so together, and with something like care for one another, or if not ready care, then an optimism that we might be able to be better. Together.

All to say: I really, really liked it.

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September 6, 2026 · 1:22 pm

Whistler: I Loved It

Did I love Ann Patchett’s Whistler for the book itself or for the experience of reading it? Hard to say. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book in deep immersion. You can blame the pandemic, or parenting, or divorce, or the interet, or the deterioration of all our attention spans wrought by smartphones or all of the above, but long gone are the easy days of picking up a novel and just… reading it until it ends. Now I read in fragmented chunks of a chapter at breakfast, a few pages before passing out asleep, a few pages when I sit myself down and firmly insist I Am Going To Relax And Read.

Cue bringing Whistler on a six day canoe trip. Here, I thought, will be where I read. And for the first four days I had the same problem as at home, only here the distractions were the need to hang bags in trees to keep them from the bears or the pure exhaustion of having portaged for 75km. Until the fourth day when we were spoiled with only two hours of paddling and arrived at a site where I could hang my hammock and just… read. And guys, I read that book and was immersed in it and time disappeared and everything was bliss.

You knew there was going to be an Until.

Until the book itself failed me. Oh but it’s perfection in narration – story telling at its best with funny and full characters that make their truth known in small actions and perfect dialogue. A plot that understands its scope – girl reunites with long forgotten third step father and recalls and then explores a trauma they shared alongside revisiting and reinterpreting family dynamics and forging new ones – and executes with brilliant pacing. Terrific writing that is neither showy nor wasted.

*spoilers ahead

But then Patchette can’t seem to clinch it. Unwilling, I guess, to kill Eddie *which BY THE WAY the only time I stopped reading was to take a break to tend to the fire because I knew (or thought I knew) that Eddie was about to die and I couldn’t accept it and didn’t want to. Oh there’s an elegant and literary way of explaining this ending – the precision of knowing ‘when to stop,’ and the genius of exploiting the core theme that we are all writing our own stories, we are all deciding at any given moment what part of our story matters to ourselves and to others and what to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people (I am not kidding, the theme here is brilliantly done and stays with you) but it felt like such a cop-out, like an unwilligness to give this reader what she yearned for: a big cathartic cry on a hammock overlooking an Alogonquin lake lol

Alas, I was left to imagine my own ending – and if I were in a book club that read a book we could talk about it. For now, maybe you tell me: what was it like to read this one? what did you make of the ending?

Yours in the temporary bliss of deep reading. And here’s hoping this sets the pattern by reminding me of the exquisite joy of being in a great book.

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