by Philip K. Dick It’s been a while since I read something that felt a bit dated. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came across that way, but for a very different reason; you could easily date Cuckoo’s Nest based on its writing style. A more fitting comparison to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?…
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by Patrick deWitt When, in reading, I come across outlandish fantasies or nightmares relating to the plot, I often enjoy them immensely. I think back to Vonnegut’s Der Arme Dolmetscher: The protagonist’s heroic fantasy, made up with only the limited German phrases that he knew, absolutely made that story. In Gogol’s Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and…
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by Kazuo Ishiguro Some authors tie everything up in a neat little package, leading the reader along a clear path through the narrative in their stories. Ishiguro is not one of those authors, or, at least, A Pale View of Hills is definitely not one of those stories. No, it comes across that way at…
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by Christian Bӧk Coming at it from the perspective of a man that has a lot to learn when it comes to poetry, The Xenotext: Book 1 was quite lofty, and I found it at least some degrees of inaccessible. Luckily for me, Bӧk was kind enough to include explanations for his poems at the…
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by Ernest Zimmermann It may seem a stretch to believe that an intriguing statement was all it took to launch the late Ernest Zimmermann, then a history professor at Lakehead University, into countless hours of research and investigation that eventually led to the publishing of The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior, but that’s the…
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by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson After finishing Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration, I very quickly picked up my copy of Why Nations Fail, with the earnest intention of reading it soon-after, at the express recommendation of the author of the former. (Within his book, of course; I don’t know Ferguson, personally.) And then…
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by Darin Kennedy There are quite a few songs that spoke to me on a deep, visceral level, but never quite to the extent that music spoke to Darin Kennedy, who wrote a book as a result. And, I definitely can’t compete with Anthony Faircloth in Kennedy’s story, The Mussorgsky Riddle. I mean, he set…
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by Rich Terfry When I first heard that Terfry would be publishing his memoir about half a year ago, I could hardly contain my excitement. I love his music, and it was always a joy to read his numerous stories he shared on Facebook ––some of which appear to have made their way into Wicked…
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by Patrick deWitt Some books don’t really live up to the hype surrounding them. The two that spring to mind here are The Alchemist and Good Omens, both of which were repeatedly recommended to me and seemingly universally praised, but I thought were just okay, at best. With multiple awards won, being in the finals…
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by Elizabeth May After reading Mulcair’s Strength of Conviction and Trudeau’s Common Ground, it seemed fitting to end my excursion into political memoirs with May’s Who We Are. (It would appear as though I have a glaring omission with no Harper book, but I suppose it’s hard to read something that doesn’t exist.) Where the…
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