Each of us who obsesses about reading and books has an idea of The Reader we are, the books we choose and the writers whose stories we most value and prefer to share. Note: obsesses, I'm aware that this is weird. But tracking our selections is one way to
Continuing yesterday’s talk of remembrance reading, while I reflect on other reading from 2025 and possibilities for reading this year. The first of his books published in his mother tongue (Gikuyu), Weep Not, Child is the second novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (b. 1938), who
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
