Timothy Findley's Spadework (2001) This is an author who has been particularly important to me. In that peculiar way in which someone with whom you have had virtually no contact can affect you more than people with whom you have spent years of your life. So I delayed reading his
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."
Louise Penny's Dead Cold (2006) Louise Penny's The Cruellest Month(2007) I plunged into Louise Penny's Gamache mysteries last October with the first in her series, Still Life. When I found books two and three nestled together on the library's paperback mysteries shelf, earlier this summer, I felt like someone was
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
