In which I discuss some of the skinny volumes, which have nestled into my bookbag. (Meanwhile longer works, like Timothy Findley's The Piano Man's Daughter and Greg Iles' Natchez Burning, were left at home.) Stephen Thomas' The Jokes is not funny-haha, but funny-hmmm. It's not meant to be funny-haha either, although many
My reading resolutions for this year revolve around a set of too-long-unread books. Many of which were too-long-unread because they are long and complicated. Like Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes, which I have been leaving at home, while these slimmer volumes have been
Readers might expect a retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Paris and Helen to be a bulky, wordy novel as useful for propping up a window on a hot summer day as for entertainment; but Jonatham Bennett's contemporary version of the story is a slim, polished novel that one would need to
If she were to tell the story again, it would be a little different. You might wonder how, because Bo's story seems all-of-a-piece, powerful just as it is, at once archetypal and unique. Random House Canada, 2014 "No one knows. But one thing is true. Whenever someone retells
When the angels invaded the plotline of "Supernatural", I stopped watching weekly. I prefer stone rabbits and hedgehogs in my flowerbeds, over white winged statues. And when a girlfriend told me that the child she lost at full-term is an angel now, I struggled to keep my face expressionless, silently repeating
