Many of the letters in A Memoir of Friendship are about writing and reading, books and manuscripts; Blanche Howard and Carol Shields swapped book recommendations and writing frustrations and philosophies alongside the everyday stuff and nonsense of life. In 1993, Blanche wrote to Carol Shields, two years after their
In which there is talk of novels which were read too quickly to allow for extensive note-taking and snapshots: good reading. Yewande Omotoso's The Woman Next Door (2017) Longlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize this year, this story about two women in their eighties, neighbours in South Africa, is quietly
Because I love making reading lists almost as much as I love reading the books that I add to them, I have big plans for my MustReadEverything Reading Projects, but then there are dozens of other books that I also want to read. This year so far, I have reread seven
If it had only been made into a film, I'm convinced that Elizabeth Taylor's Palladian would enjoy the same public flourishes of devotion that Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm can claim. Both novels are so bookishly satirical that we bookish folks have to squint to see the satire. But where
Margaret Goodfellow and Phil Goodfellow's A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto Douglas&McIntyre, 2010 It's perfectly pocket-sized and so it should be. It's just the book that you want to pop in there when the sun is shining and you want to go exploring. Lest you worry that this
