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
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."
Alice Munro’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (II) Toronto: Penguin, 1974. At some point I started to wonder if I couldn't simply fit my response to all of these stories into a single post. I mean...long and complicated books like Nicole Krauss' Great House? Classics like Thomas Hardy's Jude
Alice Munro’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (II) Toronto: Penguin, 1974. In "Marrakesh", Dorothy wonders: "What is there here that is not being told?" She sets herself to figuring it out. "She had had a great deal of experience listening to the voices of children who were leaving things
