Two young women in Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch (2021; Trans. Christina MacSweeney) find a list of the books their friend had planned to read and the copies of them she had gathered, after she has died. They “divvy up the books and tear the reading list in two.
Lorna Sage writes beautifully about Djuna Barnes and her 1937 novel Nightwood in her essay collection, Moments of Truth. She describes how Barnes presents “the Paris of abject carnival, a kind of human menagerie” and then Sage gives just a peek of how it was “written, rewritten and wrenched
Originally I’d planned to split this post into two, as I gradually read through the categories for the Toronto Public Library Reading Challenge (Part One and Two), but with a lot of desk hours lost to illness this year, I’ve combined them. (Notes: Other books read for the challenge
Ipellie, Lindberg, and Saona Short Stories in October, November and December Whether in a dedicated collection or a magazine, short stories captureand create a variety of reading moods. This quarter, I returned to one favourite writer and also explored two new-to-me story writers.
Sarah Cox’s Signs of Life (2024) vividly but succinctly describes many key figures in the conservation community: the two-legged, among them. The way she describes Ken Wu, for instance (executive director of Endangered Ecosystems Alliance): “a mile-a-minute talker”, son of Taiwanese immigrants in Alberta, who saw a photograph at
