by Terry Fallis After five demoralizing years in Canadian politics, Daniel Addison decides to quit his job as speechwriter to the leader of the Opposition Liberals to start teaching English at the University of Ottawa. (The decision came shortly after unintentionally witnessing his girlfriend’s late-night “political discourse” with the House Leader.) But, as a last…
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by Stephen Hawking Well, here’s another one that’s been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. And I think I can be excused for being a bit intimidated by this one. I mean, it’s not that long or anything, but I was well concerned that opening A Brief History of Time would be…
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by Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Wolfe’s account of the psychedelic adventures Ken Kesey, the author, and his band of “heads” (acid heads), the Merry Pranksters––often in their crazy hippie bus. Having met Kesey in the midst of his drug possession trials in the late ’60s, Wolfe cobbled his book together from…
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by Margaret Atwood It’s interesting to me when similar techniques employed by different authors elicit vastly different responses from me. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is reminiscent of one such technique I loved from Omar El Akkad’s American War, in that the whole final chapter reads like a transcript from a…
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by Diane Schoemperlen First Things First is a collection of early short stories by Schoemperlen, published from the mid-’70s––while studying English at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University––up to the early ’90s. This wide breadth of publication gives a reader a bird’s-eye-view of the evolution of an author. And this isn’t to suggest the writing’s poor early…
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by Richard Wagamese Indian Horse follows Saul Indian Horse as his life takes him from a northern Ojibway reserve through the world of the the White Man and all the abuse and racism it forces him to endure. After a hopeless life in a residential school, he gets a taste of joy and salvation in…
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by Khaled Hosseini Lately, on-the-nose dialogue and overt writing in fiction has really been grating on me in my reading. This isn’t to say that either of these related issues are the worst offenders in literature, but they’re usually enough to hurt the story, enough to change what could have been great into just something…
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by Thomas Pynchon Pynchon is another author I’ve been meaning to read for a long time now. Though I probably should have asked around before picking up the only novel of his I recognized by title, that “Alex luck” I seem accustomed to caused that same book to be what is widely considered one of…
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by Jean E. Pendziwol The Lightkeeper’s Daughters follows Elizabeth, a blind woman living at a nursing home, and Morgan, a teen forced to perform community service cleaning the graffiti she spray-painted on the nursing home’s fence. After Elizabeth’s father’s old journals are recovered from a shipwreck, she enlists Morgan to help her go through them,…
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by Marian Engel I think I should start things off by warning that this isn’t Claire Cameron’s The Bear, as people seem to immediately think when I bring up Engel’s book. No, this is that book that fell off of everyone’s radar in recent years, despite my understanding that it was at least somewhat controversial…
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