One of the skills I developed during my undergraduate degree was finding connections among the books I was reading for different courses. I’d hear about an idea in one course and take that idea and put it to work in another; or I’d notice themes from one novel resonating in another course that might be distant in time or geography. I’m not sure whether this cross-reading was intention on the part of the program (I’m pretty sure not) but the consequence was that I took personal pleasure in finding these moments of connection or overlap. I’d probably have made for an excellent thematic critic. Alas. I raise all of this because even now with the combination of my terrible memory and my appetite for reading I often find myself midway into a book and certain I’ve recently read something similar, or surprised that everyone seems to be writing about X topic (which probably owes more to how I select what I read than the novels themselves…). Continue reading
Lost in September: I predict a Giller nominee.
Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Prize Winner
Truly, Madly, Guilty: The Unexpected Pleasure
I don’t believe in diets. In fact I’m pretty vocal about how ridiculous and counterproductive they are. Part of the reason is because of the fast-binge cycle: your body isn’t built for nutrient deprivation and so you get hungrier and hungrier until you find yourself crouched over the tub of icecream in the middle of the night wondering for what purpose you ever started out. Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction
The Racketeer: What a Tub of Icecream is to Literature
I packed for the cottage: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a collection of the best of Alice Munro, and the only Margaret Laurence novel I’ve never read, The Fire Dwellers. I was set with the triumvirate of excellent Canadian authors (who also happen to be white ladies). I imagined sitting on the dock taking in the changing leaves and lapping lake while absorbing some of the best of Canadian literature. Instead I got to the cottage, put out all the books on the coffee table and immediately… picked up the copy of John Grishman’s The Racketeer from the cottage bookshelf. Turns out what I really wanted was to eat a tub of mental icecream. And I did. And I felt appropriately sick after, so there you go. I seem to recall C. using a similar description in her guest post, so thanks C. for making me think of novels as tasty treats! Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction
Birdie: Why my book club friends are always wrong.
There are books you read because you want to, books you read because they’re recommended, books you read because you’re required, books you read out of curiosity and books you read because you should. For me, Tracy Lindberg’s Birdie is a novel I was required to read for book club and a book I thought I should read because Lindberg brings voice in fiction to the narrative of murdered and missing indigenous women. While I’m glad I read it, I didn’t enjoy the novel, or think it was particularly well written. Continue reading
Filed under Book Club, Book I'll Forget I Read, Canadian Literature, Fiction
