Louise Penny's Still Life Headline, 2005 Some of you might recall my eye-rolling, woulda-been-snarky-if-I-wasn't-so-darned-Canadian letter to The Public Library late-spring this year. I offer this post to balance the scales, for there is another staff member there whom I actually look forward to seeing behind the counter. She started a conversation
Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins NY: HarperCollins, 1997. “When young writers write to me about following in the footsteps of those who string together nouns and verbs for a living, I tell them this: every story has already been told,” said Anna Quindlen, delivering the
David Bergen's The Matter with Morris Harper Collins, 2010 You might have guessed that David Bergen's The Time in Between wasn't my favourite book from the Giller Prize shortlist of 2005. It wasn't that I disliked it, so much as I felt disconnected from it. It felt like a universal
Dear Giller Shortlist, Oh, how I used to wait for your five names. Before readers could tweet about you, I camped on your webpage and, with a book in hand, pounded the refresh button religiously with every page turn. (My tech-minded fella told me it could be harmful to strike
Richard B. Wright's Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard Phyllis Bruce - Harper Collins, 2010 I was so annoyed with myself as a reader for not properly appreciating Richard Wright's October; I knew it was very well-done and it was simply my preternatural attachment to his earlier novel, Clara Callan, that interfered with
