This year I am trying to read more deliberately whimsically. Go ahead and giggle, I know it’s ridiculous. Over the course of a reading lifetime, I’ve allowed some reading habits that I enjoyed to fall away, like reading with the seasons in mind. Like resolving to read something
Just yesterday I was commenting to a friend that my reading of late has felt rather disheartening. Some beautiful writing, and vitally important stories, but it was taking a toll. It reminded me that there’s been other reading in my stacks in recent weeks that could serve to balance.
Julia is lying on the hotel bathroom floor with a nosebleed, a few hours before her literary reading, from her book of poetry, at an event in northern Ontario. She jokes that she’s a “promising” poet, which means that her fee is lower than that paid to poets who
The more that I read now about the climate emergency, the more references I find within my other reading. Here, in Deirdre McNamer’s Aviary (2021), an unexpectedly lyrical rumination: “She prayed for the groaning, hectically gorgeous, steaming world, which seemed, more and more often, to lurch and shudder on
There’s a shadow over Cherie Dimaline’s latest novel, Empire of Wild (2019). Part of it could appear in a history text: “In the church and at his Catholic day school, the priests called seven the age of reason. Moshom called it the age of learning how the hell to
