by Liz Harmer I find it interesting to consider what influences your opinion of a book while reading. The big thing that spurred this thought along was a passage in The Amateurs where the protagonist, Marie, realizes how starkly unique she is just before discussing architecture influenced by architecture influenced by architecture. (I won’t directly…
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by Chigozie Obioma Some time ago, I was discussing literature with a friend, when the topic turned to the comparison of Kevin Hardcastle’s writing to Cormac McCarthy’s in numerous blurbs and reviews, and how such an exercise usually sets him up for unreasonable expectations that tend to be crushed in due course. At the time,…
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Rubáiyát are tetrastichs, independent stanzas, each composed of four lines of near equal length. In their traditional form, all except the third line rhymes, though, occasionally, all lines of the verse rhyme. Omar Khayyám’s rubáiyát are probably the most famous poems written in the form, though they were obscure in the Western world until Edward…
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by Noam Chomsky Presented with a massive sale on a large number of Noam Chomsky books, I recently found myself the proud owner of about a billion of them, so expect them to crop up in my reviews periodically, at least for the foreseeable future. (It was kind of hard to decide which of his…
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by Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is Illuminated is autobiographical, but only a touch, only superficially. It’s about a character named Jonathan Safran Foer travelling to Ukraine with only an old picture to help him find a woman who may have helped save his grandfather from the Nazis. This much actually happened, but I understand that…
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by Grant Matheson The Golden Boy is Matheson’s memoir about his personal experience with narcotic and alcohol addiction. It starts by relating the beginnings of the illness taking shape in the early 2000s, when he was a physician practising in Charlottetown, and how his life spiralled out of control as he sank deeper and deeper…
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by Gore Vidal In the final days of high school in small town Virginia, Jim Willard has a homosexual encounter with Bob Ford, and he falls for him hard. Unfortunately for Jim, this happens only days before Bob leaves to travel the world as a sailor. The City and the Pillar follows Jim’s journey in…
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by Pablo Neruda I don’t know if I can stress enough the importance I find comes with reading a book of poetry through twice, back-to-back. I haven’t necessarily done it with every poetry collection I’ve read––not the longer ones, specifically––but my opinion feels so much more well informed at the end of such an exercise….
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by Khalil Gibran The Prophet is Gibran’s famous collection of poetic essays. Framed as a prophet preparing to leave a place he’s lived for over a decade, he imparts his final words of wisdom to the people he loves, those who have come to love him back, who listen in rapt attention. And these words…
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by Andrew Battershill Marry, Bang, Kill follows Alan Mouse––Mousey to his “friends”––a retired cop living on Quadra Island, a quiet place just off the coast of Vancouver Island. When he crosses paths with Tommy Marlo, a small time mugger who stole a laptop loaded with incriminating photos along with a hundred grand from a dangerous…
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