Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve. Carol Shields Republic of Love

Tamara Levine’s But Hope is Longer (2012)

When Tamara Levine was diagnosed with breast cancer, she began sending e-mail letters to about fifty family members, friends and colleagues, to keep everybody in the loop.

Second Story Press, 2012

Almost immediately, these letters took on a great significance in her Healing Journey, offering a kind of ‘therapy’ (Greek for healing), “helping to [...]

Gerry Fostaty’s As You Were (2011)

It’s the summer of 1974, twenty-five kilometres north of Quebec City, and eighteen-year-old Gerry Fostaty is on a cadet training assignment.

Goose Lane Editions, 2011

A cadet training assignment on a Canadian Forces base?

I know nothing of this world, beyond what I’ve gleaned from “Private Benjamin”, “An Officer and a Gentleman” and a [...]

Georgia Nicols’ You and Your Future (2011)

When I was twelve,  I got a boxed kit which allowed me to draw my own astrology chart.

House of Anansi, 2011

More than ten years later, I finally wrapped my head around the mathematical charts in the back of the book.

In the meantime, I admired the colourful diagrams, the wet-erase maps of [...]

Another kind of storytelling: Born Liars

You haven’t heard from him much lately, I know. But once upon a time (well, this theme is all about storytelling, right?), Mr BIP was a strong presence in these lands. Some of you might remember when he won a cheerleading award for Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, though lately he’s been reading more than cheering.

Nonetheless, he [...]

Sara Maitland’s Gossip from the Forest (2012)

Sometimes, you sense the match between you and a particular book immediately.

Granta Books, 2012 (via House of Anansi)

That’s what happened with me and Sara Maitland’s book.

I still remember the pang of realization in discovering that it had not yet been published: the long wait for The Perfect Book.

It was worth [...]

Donna B. Pincus’ Growing Up Brave (2012)

Little Brown & Company, 2012

Growing Up Brave begins with the author arriving to deliver a talk a couple of years ago, shocked that the modest attendance she had expected was a crowd of 700 people in a high school auditorium.

The audience was comprised of parents, caregivers, guidance counselors, school nurses, pediatricians, psychologists and [...]

Pill-Popping Preschoolers: No Epidemic Required

A remarkable rise in children’s emotional and behavioural problems?

2011; W.W. Norton & Company, 2012

A striking upsurge in the diagnoses of ADHD, childhood depression and bipolar disorder, autism?

A significant increase in the number of children taking psychiatric medications?

It’s a mental health epidemic.

Or, not.

What happens when you view children’s symptoms as [...]

Why read a book when you could just talk about it?

It’s Rebecca’s fault that I read this. And does the fact that she enjoyed it so much suggest that she has never actually read any of those works she has discussed on Of Books and Bicycles? You’ll have to ask her about that.

Raincoast Books, 2007Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman

Because certainly Pierre Bayard is making [...]

Joan Bodger on Making Literary Pilgrimages

I first read Joan Bodger’s How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books (1959) about twenty years ago, and I recall liking it well enough, but wishing that there was a little more about their bookishness and a little less about England.

Now I think it’s a perfect blend. Mum and Dad and Ian [...]

Girls for sale: at what cost?

HarperCollins, 2012

Not in your neighbourhood, right?

When you think about trafficking, you think of “Thai girls in shackles”, or “Russian girls held at gunpoint by the mob”, or “illegal border crossings, fake passports, and captivity”.

You don’t think of Americans trafficking Americans; that doesn’t happen to American girls.

You don’t think about eleven-year-old [...]