What I was not carrying in my bookbag this month: David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw and the third volume in G.R.R. Martin's Ice and Fire series. These hefty volumes stayied at home, but these slimmer books were travelling this month. And there was more to-ing and fro-ing this month
“If prison isn’t prison, the outside world has no meaning!” So says Aurora to Charmaine in Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Heart Goes Last. McClelland & Stewart, 2015 (Penguin Random House) It dates back, the CanLit icon's interest in imprisonment, a preoccupation with the idea of lives which
So, it's past the middle of November, so I'm surprised to find myself surrounded by so many mosquitoes. First in the fifth volume of Laura Ingalls Wilder's series, On the Shores of Silver Lake. Living so close to the land, the other residents are regularly brushing elbows (and paws and wings
I returned to picture books when a face-to-face bookclub read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Books without pictures still outnumber the illustrated volumes in my stacks, but I am working to adjust the balance. The Good Little Book, written by Kyo Maclear and illustrated by Marion Arbona, will suit booklovers
Our young separatist narrator is imagining his own future and the future of Quebec, and both man and nation are struggling with matters of expression and independence, in Hubert Aquin's Next Episode (published in 1965, translated by Sheila Fischman in 2001). “I am the fragmented symbol of Quebec’s revolution, its
