When I was in the tenth grade, nothing about technology intimidated me. I signed up for classes in high school which taught binary and how to write simple programs, and my first full-time job was working with a woman who could program in COBOL. Goose Lane Editions, 2015
The imagery on the cover, symbols of earth and sky, is a perfect reflection of this novel's focus on the conflict between earth-based and sky-based belief systems in 7th-century Northumbria. And, yet, it is not that simple, because the characters of Wilona and Egan are fully developed and complex. Their
On the list of 10 Perfect Alice Munro sentences, recently selected by CBC, this is the first: "Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person." It begs the question, "When does one stop becoming somebody new every year?" Perhaps after an event like the incident described in this
Over the summer, I have been reading a lot of magazines. With some magazines, I "subscribe-incessently-and-renew-unthinkingly" and, with others, I practice the "when-I'm-in-the-mood-to-browse-the-newsstand" method. Both of these purchasing methods result in a tremendous backlog of reading for me, because I'm curious about so many things that the stacks quickly become
Like Anne Tyler, the only plot that Marina Endicott has is the passage of time. The events in her novels are ordinary happenings, but there is a delicious sense of unspooling when one falls into one of her narratives. Doubleday Canada, 2015 Close to Hugh is structured over a week's time and
