The Summer Lovin' Read-a-Thon was a tonne of fun. Really: a week of reading. How could that not be fun? But add in lots of enthusiasm, eager participants, and a good plan (they are one organized group!) and an event like this is even more fun. When I was thinking
The cover of Christene A. Browne's Two Women pulled me back to a literary pilgrimage I made to Regent Park, in Toronto, after I read Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy. But Regent Park is not so much a character in this novel as the women themselves. Though, which two
While Love and Forgetting was in my stack of current reads, I listened to the World Book Club's podcast edition of a discussion of Albert Camus' The Outsider. Camus is someone whose work I associate with formal study, not pleasure, but Harriet Gilbert's interviews draw me into subjects I don't
You might think Struan is an unlikely setting for a novel. A town you can walk through in under ten minutes (even on slippery wintry surfaces). Knopf Canada, 2013 "Walking from one end of Struan to the other takes less than ten minutes. If you kept walking south
Listening to an interview with Amy Tan, for the Guardian book club, I was struck by the fact that she lifted many of the stories from her mother's life for the pages of her work. Yet, while reading Lives of the Family, it is easy to imagine so many of
