Category Archives: Prize Winner

June 5, 2025 · 9:22 pm

Playground: Meh?

I don’t know. Richard Power’s Playground is a book I *should like. It’s an interweaving of different characters that all converge at the end. It has (some) good writing (a lot of it, though, is over written and exhausting). There’s interesting (?) questions about the nature of humanity – how we might or might not be distinct from animals or machines. Certainly compelling questions about friendship and how our friends can define our lives.

But ultimately I’m here to report it’s pretty boring. End of the day, bottom line, if I had to read another description of a coral reef or game of Go I think I’d have hurled the book across the room.

Do we care that there’s an AI character? And that I am someone who is (ostensibly) interested in AI? Not really.

What about an intrepid woman scientist who explores the oceans trailblazing for other women (while suppressing her sexuality – there can only be So Much Trailblazing)? I guess that’s interesting enough, but somehow it reads as.. not very.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my mood – it’s hot and I wish the air conditioning was on. Perhaps if you were to read this book in the winter it might be a different experience.

You tell me – have any of you enjoyed this one? What am I missing.

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May 7, 2025 · 9:53 am

Oh William! In a world of too many books to read, read Elizabeth Strout

There’s an argument for God* to be made in the way that sometimes, right when you need it most, a book finds you. It’s how I felt about Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and it’s how I feel about Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William. The book was already extremely overdue at the library, and I had intended to put it in the pile among (too many) others that I ambitiously checked out only to run up against the realities of my limited time. But I’d been looking forward to it, having recently finished Tell Me Everything which I loved, and I figured what is the worst the public library can do? (I know, I know, I owe the library more respect then that. I do know.)

And well Oh William is like all the other Strout books I’ve read in its direct tone, in its simplicity of story, in its beauty of writing. In this one Lucy Barton reflects on her first marriage with William. What brought her to him, why she left, what the staying and leaving cost her, what she needed from him when they were together, what she needed from him after, and how you can love someone through all the many odd and unexpected permutations of a life.

More then a story about their marriage though – or alongside it maybe – is that of William’s mother, Catherine. How she left her one-year old daughter to go start a life with another man, and how the rest of her life was haunted by that decision (and William in discovering this secret must confront the truth that his mother was not who or how he thought she was, but someone more and different, and aren’t we all). Lucy makes the parallels to her own leaving of her daughters when she left William and how this decision hurt her daughters and was necessary. I guess something about what sacrifices mothers are called to make, or make differently from fathers (or presented as such, I guess).

Why did I need this book right now? I suppose there was something to the reminder in it that the stories we have about ourselves and the people we love are just that: stories. That they are written, rewritten and edited in the too many experiences or misunderstandings of our everyday. That we are not and are relationships are not One Thing.

And in a time – still a time – when there is much that is far, far beyond our scope of control (if not influence), there is something so heartening and humbling in the reminder that of this – the story of your life and its decisions – you do have some authority.

*Stipulated I do not believe in God, but you can try to translate as something like love, or interconnection, or mystery.

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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March 19, 2025 · 12:56 am

All Fours: I don’t know what to tell you. It’s either very good or I can’t tell because of all 18+ content

My mum was not wrong when she told me Miranda July’s All Fours was ‘very graphic’ and ‘shocking.’ She was kind enough to suggest that someone of my generation might not be as scandalized, but honestly? It was pretty graphic – pushing the bounds of vulgar. I guess to see where the line is between vulgar and beautiful?

And maybe someone of my generation was even more scandalized because boy does it make menopause look like A Ride I Would Rather Not Take.

So backing up: unnamed protagonist heads out on a road trip she doesn’t really want to take because she wants to prove to herself (and her husband and friends) that she is the kind of person who wants to take a road trip. She makes it half an hour outside the city before camping out in a motel for three weeks.

I have to admire her resolve to abandon any pretence with herself. She knows she’s not going to leave the motel – having fallen (in the weirdest possible way) totally in love with this random man, Davey, that she locks eyes with in a gas station parking lot. A series of further weirdness follows including a 20K redecoration of the motel room orchestrated by Davey’s wife. A scene with a tampon that will live forever etched in my mind.

And then suddenly it got pretty boring. She gets back from her road trip and is very sad about no-more Davey, and very sad about getting old and eventually dying, and being in perimenopause, and boy did I lose interest. Not that I was hooked for the vulgarity, but more for the weirdness, the out of place and timeness. And back in LA and in her regular life it was just… not as compelling. And drawn out with the angst.

Anyway, she ends up in a functional open marriage with her genderless child living on the profits of her art, so you know, really leaning in to the typical reader’s experience.

All that said there are some spectacular scenes of dancing. For those of you persuaded dancing is a spiritual activity – and I know there are plenty of you – the novel has some very moving scenes of the connection dance allows. Said by one extremely bad and energetic dancer.

Oh it does have extraordinary good writing.

Should you read it? I don’t know? Maybe? Probably so you can be hip and pretend like you weren’t floored by the scene X Y and Z – all extreme and all intense. Actually that’s a good enough reason – read it because rare to find a book that makes you feel this much, even (especially?) when that feeling is surprise, disgust, desire, lust, shock – all from reading! Books, man. They are something else.

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