Terry Fallis’ The Best Laid Plans McClelland & Stewart, 2007 Daniel Addison arrived on Partliament Hill in Ottawa to work as a speech writer, “[n]aïve, innocent, and excited” and left five years later, “embittered, exhausted, and ineffably sad”. The Best Laid Plans begins after that, so you might expect a
Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind Doubleday-Random House, 2000 Worthlessness. Disappointment. Boredom. Hellishness. Despair. The eleven stories in Lynn Coady’s debut collection (which followed her astonishingly successful debut novel Strange Heaven) are not for the faint-of-heart. Worthlessness, from “A Great Man’s Passing” “It was her fault because she had done
In my books, this is unmissable bookishness. At one point, I had fallen six months behind in my listening, but there was no question of deleting those episodes of The Next Chapter; it's a no-fail source of reading recommendations for me. Shelagh Rogers’ casual around-the-kitchen-table bookchat brings out a layer to the
This is my second-last Shelf Discovery Challenge post and read. I deliberately chose both this and Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear to round things up because they were among the books that helped me shift away from kidlit and YA books to adult reading. The transition via
Austin Clarke's More Thomas Allen, 2008 I can't help it: when I see a stack of new books at the library, I am compelled to, at the very least, ogle them. Usually I pick one up. Often I pet one (even if it's just a shinier version of a favourite
