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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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,…
Read more
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…
Read more
by Steven Martin I think I’m far too impressionable, and arguably for the wrong reasons. I mean, if I was picking up good habits and useful knowledge it’d be one thing, but it was only in the midst searching up opium pipes on eBay that I really had to stop and think about what I…
Read more
by P. G. Wodehouse In Something Fresh, the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle unintentionally walks off with the prized scarab from the collection of the American billionaire, J. Preston Peters. Though Peters wants it back, he doesn’t want to cause a scandal by accusing Emsworth of theft. For, not only did Emsworth, finding the…
Read more