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
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This title recalls Barbara’s “Oranges and Apples” game, the idea of having to choose between two things.
1990; Penguin, 1991
It also echoes Anne having asked Matthew, en route to Green Gables: “Which would you rather be if you had the choice–divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”
And, yet, the overt allusion [...]
It is often said that a single story by Alice Munro contains as much complexity as a novel written by another writer.
1990; Penguin, 1991
One might recall long stories like “Chaddeleys and Flemings” or expansive stories like “The Moon over the Orange Street Skating Rink” or, in this collection, its title story or “Meneseteung”.
[...]
Jennifer Close has a reputation for having nailed the whole young-woman’s-coming-of-age thing in her first novel, Girls in White Dresses.
And that, with the image of a young woman on the cover messing with the belt of her dress, brought Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep to my mind.
Doubleday – Random House, 2013
Yes, I admit [...]
At one time, Zeigler’s Department Store had a grocery department and a hardware department, but no longer.
1990; Penguin, 1991
The store assortment has changed. The role of the department store has changed. Downtown Walley has changed. And, perhaps most significantly, Murray has changed.
When the story opens, Murray’s father is telling him that he [...]
When Hazel Curtis travels to Scotland, she tells people that it was a trip that she and Jack had always planned to take together.
1990; Penguin, 1991
And now that she’s a widow, Jack cannot contradict Hazel, speak out to say that he never wanted to take that trip.
For now that she’s a [...]
In my first post about this year’s Once Upon a Time reading, I mentioned all the books that I have, since, finished reading, though at the time I was just beginning:
Image links to Challenge AnnouncementImage by Melissa Nucera
Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993), Bill Willingham’s 1001 Nights of Snowfall (2006), Charles de Lint’s The Dreaming Place (1990), Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Carol [...]
Some writers might take a book to do it. Carol Shields did, in Swann. Timothy Findley did, in The Wars.
1990; Penguin, 1991
Alice Munro takes a short story to build a life from fragments left behind.
In this case, in “Meneseteung”, the fragments are culled from a book called Offerings (“Gold lettering on [...]
As with “Friend of My Youth”, the bulk of “Five Points” concerns a story told by one of the characters, Neil, who is speaking of events from his past, when he was a boy in British Columbia.
1990; Penguin, 1991
In both stories, the story rooted in Neil’s memories and the present-day story of [...]
When we meet Jonny, he can’t sleep; he turns on the light to play The Secret Land of Zenon.
Simon & Schuster, 2013
In this first sentence of Teddy Wayne’s novel, Jonny might be any eleven-year-old boy.
But even while listening to the background music for Zenon, Jonny recognizes the audience-loyalty retention strategy at [...]
The title story of this collection begins with talk of an act being “too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness”.
1990; Penguin, 1991
On first reading, this seems a straightforward observation about the narrator’s relationship with her mother.
She has been dreaming of her mother on occasion.
And this recurring dream [...]
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