As if it wasn't enough to obsess about Reading and ReLi-ting, I'm also obsessing about the Toronto Book Award, whose shortlist was announced this week. THE 2011 TORONTO BOOK AWARD (More deets here.) What Disturbs Our Blood, James FitzGerald (Random House) Étienne's Alphabet, James King (Cormorant Books) The Amazing Absorbing
It's been a few years since I obsessed about reading the Giller titles (but that year I discovered Charlotte Gill's Ladykiller and that was terrific). Last year I brushed up against my troubled relationship with the list (Dear Giller Shortlist, Oh, how I used to wait for your five names...) but time
Timothy Findley's Spadework (2001) This is an author who has been particularly important to me. In that peculiar way in which someone with whom you have had virtually no contact can affect you more than people with whom you have spent years of your life. So I delayed reading his
Thomas Wharton's Icefields (1995) Readers will recognize quickly whether there is a match to be made between them and Thomas Wharton's first novel. Ten pages should do it. First, there is the epigraph, from Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter: "As if everything in the world is the history of ice."
Louise Penny's Dead Cold (2006) Louise Penny's The Cruellest Month(2007) I plunged into Louise Penny's Gamache mysteries last October with the first in her series, Still Life. When I found books two and three nestled together on the library's paperback mysteries shelf, earlier this summer, I felt like someone was
