At the beginning of March, I was determined to keep my nose in a stack of backlisted books. Books like these are the kind that to keep my focus on my own shelves in this reading year. Chad Pelley’s Every Little Thing (2013) “Every day, every hour, really, it was a
The details in "Post and Bean" matter. The specific itty-bitty matters of surprising consequence. Not necessarily what one sees at first glance, but what one uncovers, what the broader whole can be understood to mean. Take the group of people in the church office. At first, a stranger to the
It doesn’t get much more obvious than stacking these truths on the book jacket: there it is. Knopf Canada, 2014 The Confabulist Steven Galloway For even though the noun more commonly associated with ‘confabulate’ is ‘confabulation’, what is most important here is not the story itself but the
Runaway readers cannot run away from the book after turning the final page. Instead, they have to burrow in. Much like "Vandals" in 1994's Open Secrets and the title story in 2012's Dear Life, "Powers" is one of those closing stories that sends readers rushing back to the beginning.
May tallies something like this: 24 books (including verse, graphic novels, and kidlit), 2 magazines, assorted stories, 2 cookbooks, and a picture book (Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till). (Surely I’m not the only person who has trouble keeping track now that there are notebooks and files to update?)
