In the middle of July, Bill and Bron and I will be chatting about “Gooseberries”, the third of Chekov’s stories we’re reading, and the second-to-last story that George Saunders considers in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (its title apparently drawn from this very story). These last
Today, talk of six books by Indigenous writers, including a novel, an illustrated children’s book, two books of poetry, and two books of non-fiction. These are works by Binnizá & Maya Ch'orti', Cree-Métis, Kanien’kehá:ka Ahkwesáhsne /Mohawk St. Regis, Kanien’kehá:ka, Wakeniáhton (Turtle Clan), and Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara/Tsimshian writers.
After I finally managed to finish the Toronto Public Library’s reading challenge last year, after so many years of leaving it half-done, some of you asked if I was planning to do the new challenge. Not likely, I said. But then the 2025 challenge was in the form of
In reading this fifty-page-long story, I followed the instructions that Saunders set out for us in the first story, curious to see whether the process would prove valuable. Saunders, himself, took a unique approach with the first of the seven stories he considers herein; he offered commentary after each
May’s story is Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” (1895), the longest of the seven Russian stories that George Saunders contemplates in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which Bill and Bron and I will read in the next couple of weeks and discuss mid-month. (The project details
