Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans McClelland & Stewart, 2007 Daniel Addison arrived on Partliament Hill in Ottawa to work as a speech writer, “[n]aïve, innocent, and excited” and left five years later, “embittered, exhausted, and ineffably sad”. The Best Laid Plans begins after that, so you might expect a
Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
Thanks for the Ride I’m accustomed to thinking of Alice Munro as the chronicler of Lives of Girls and Women, so I was surprised to come upon a male narrator in “Thanks for the Ride”. Dickie is hanging out with his cousin, George, who is three years older, in Pop’s
“Oh, I just don’t have time for fiction.” “I want to read about the Real World.” “Novels are a waste when you could be learning something.” Sentiments like these have infuriated me countless times because my reader’s heart belongs to fiction. I collect quotes like these that I imagine tossing out
In my books, this is unmissable bookishness. At one point, I had fallen six months behind in my listening, but there was no question of deleting those episodes of The Next Chapter; it's a no-fail source of reading recommendations for me. Shelagh Rogers’ casual around-the-kitchen-table bookchat brings out a layer to the
