From these ten books alone, anyone might conclude that “we” have a lot of antiques and tigers, typewriters and troubled sisters, and that we all wear sandals with socks in Canada. (I am not a fan: if it’s cold enough for socks, it’s too cold for sandals.) Moving from
Sometimes the books that affect us most profoundly are the most difficult to write about; this has been the case for me, with Wendy McGrath’s poems in The Beauty of Vultures, which was published in April this year—a collaborative work with photographer (and musician) Danny Miles. Not a week
In a loose way, these six books—suspense, horror, mystery—are arranged in the order I would read them through the course of a single day; the first two require full-on daylight, and the last I would read even after dusk (but it’s still a gripping story, though largely character-driven). For
It’s the twenty-fifth book by an Indigenous author that I’ve read this year and, if I had to choose only one, my recommendation would be Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing for its skillful navigation of personal and socio-political history. It’s both the story of a great-great-granddaughter searching for her ancestor’s
Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards (2021) came to me via ILL (thanks to the Forest Hill branch of the Toronto Public Library) because Susan, Mme Bibi, Kaggsy and Simon all loved it; so I was expecting to enjoy it, but I was not expecting to find summer in it.
