September 21, 2026

Our Noble Selves, by Kate Atkinson

I periodically have to remind myself that once upon a time I didn’t read mysteries, that it wasn’t until Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories that I discovered my affinity for the genre, and Jackson Brodie became my gateway to Armand Gamache, Lane Winslow, Dame Polara, Hercule Poirot, Inaya Rahman, Cat Conway, and more. And I love the way that Atkinson has in the years since then permitted herself to dip in and out of genre fiction, including crime novels and historical fiction, blurring the lines between literary and genre, and those between the genres themselves. I adore the way that Atkinson continues to build whatever kind of literary container her stories require, her own brilliant sparkle and deft prose style the common thread through all of it.

And this time she’s sparkling in mid-century England, against the backdrop of the Festival of Britain, a government funded celebration intended to rouse a nation from its post-war doldrums, which turns out to be a big ask as rationing is ongoing and Britons are still wracked by war trauma. Among them is Harry Flynn, a reporter who spent his war was a captured civilian on the Burma Railway, and who’s hired by the festival for various tasks. What he’s there for is not exactly certain, but this is also the case for a number of his colleagues, which means that everyone has something to hide when a young Frenchwoman disappears—but it’s Harry upon whom suspicion falls immediately.

There’s a lot going on in this novel, a rollicking whirlwind, and lines like, “Flynn was impressed. He didn’t usually consort with women who knew both Milton and more than one sexual position.” A veritable circus, like the Festival itself, this book is very good time.

September 21, 2026

Takes and Gifts

“And it feels so good these days to keep yourself for yourself. What a great trend,” writes my friend Shawna Lemay in her latest Transactions with Beauty post, to which I reply (to myself!), And how! Like Shawna, I’ve been asking what the point is with these sorts of spaces, who is even listening relishing the straightforward humanness of real life encounters. I think I’m still a bit burnt out from my very busy season last spring, and am having trouble finding the motivation to write my monthly Substack essays or resurrect my podcast. For the former, I am pressing on anyway, because I’m grateful to have paid subscribers, but on Substack itself and on the internet in general, I am getting very tired of screaming out into a void. On Instagram, I’m altogether tired of scrolling to find post after post of clickbait by people I don’t even follow, weird and warped content that actually bears no relationship to the world that I live in.

My blog feels different though—it was always fairly certain here that not many people were reading anyway, that relative obscurity was a feature, not a bug. What has always differentiated blog audiences from those of social media is that the former is highly specific, while the latter is terrifyingly general. I know who I’m talking to here. I’m fairly sure that those readers will understand me. And anybody who doesn’t will have the context clues of 20+ years of archives with which to make sense of the matter.

In a piece today, Emily Wilson (recent and well known translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad) complains about the one-noteness of internet discourse (which maybe is part of the reason I’m not very inspired to post on online essay about anything right now). She writes about the “poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator “takes” on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s an alternative to this way of being online.

I am so done with “takes,” and am thinking now about about what takes actually take—from their writers, their readers, from the culture at large. And I’m thinking about how the opposite of a take is a give/gift. What Shawna writes:

Artists and writers and makers very often think about the gifts they receive, and understand the give and take of it all. The more you give, the more you get back. It’s a mysterious and wonderful economy all its own.

September 16, 2026

My Year in Fairyland, by Sarah Ellis

“I didn’t want Sherry to leave. I thought her decision was premature. In my sorrow, I felt the pull at every moment to appropriate her into the greedy organism of my own self. But Sherry was not me. She was her own self, in her own body, with her own history. My task and my ethical responsibility was to see her as clearly as I could and love her. To look closely and love is a principle that I’ve tried to apply to all the life presents. Sherry’s situation strengthened my belief in this principle even as it stretched it to the breaking point and often drained me.”

Acclaimed and award-winning children’s author Sarah Ellis’s memoir/essay collection My Year in Fairyland is many things—it’s a love story, a life story, a death story, a report from a journey into grief, an exploration of the books and reading that underline the author’s life, a consideration of the ethics of MAID and our responsibilities to one another as human beings, and so much more.

When Ellis met her wife Sherry (at a ukulele circle, but Sherry wasn’t there to play), Sherry had already made up her mind that she was going to end her life when she was ready, before her MS symptoms could take that life over altogether. Of course, Ellis didn’t entirely believe her, especially after the two of them stitched their worlds together. Surely their love, their life, would be enough to change Sherry’s mind? But no, Sherry’s mind was not for changing (and this was Sherry’s standard; Ellis’s illustration of her wife as a larger than life whirlwind of a character is one of the most delightful parts of this remarkable book), and it was out of love that Ellis committed to helping Sherry do what she’d always said she’d do, eventually being accepted for a medically assisted death in Switzerland in 2019.

The couple received the date for Sherry’s death a year ahead of time, and Ellis comes to see this liminal period as they were waiting for it to happen as a kind of fairyland. The usual rules are suspended, a surreality infuses everything, they’re working toward something inevitable that feels impossible. Ellis writes about realizing that notions of a bucket list would not work for them, that steeping themselves in ordinary everydayness was what they truly desired with the time they had left together.

But there are practical matters as well—they’d maintained separate households, and needed to clean out Sherry’s house. What to do with the two coffins she used as coffee tables? What things of Sherry’s does Ellis want to hold onto?

She writes about what fairyland and notions of play had meant to her as a child, of how they’d inform her perspective of the world and a child’s eye view. She writes about how notions of play underlined the life she built with Sherry: “It was the shape of our landscape.” About her struggle to accept Sherry’s wishes, and how her finally doing so is informed by an allusion to The Secret Garden. About riddles in general and the ultimate riddle, which is life itself. About the fairy stories that had “furnished the rooms of my imagination for a lifetime.” How writing helped her through the experience, and made her think about her writing differently, that maybe it had always been more personal than she’d ever imagined. About weddings, wifedom, queerness, and “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Dancing by the light of the moon. (The moon.) And finally of what it was to come home from the experience of Sherry’s death, the same but utterly changed. The riddle of that, her own personal Odyssey.

My Year in Fairyland is a gorgeously woven tapestry, a generous offering, and a pleasure to read.

September 14, 2026

Queen Mab, by Emily McBride

Queen Mab is Madeleine, so-called by her husband. She’s a Canadian academic, adopted to an English mother and a Quebecois father, who has moved to her mother’s homeland to study the Modernists and Victorians. She’s married young and is surprised and not surprised to find herself pregnant in the middle of her graduate studies: “It was what I had wanted, but immediately I no longer wanted it. I was only twenty-three. What had I been thinking?”

I’ve read changeling stories before, among many other novels about postpartum rupture, but Emily McBride’s debut novel, Queen Mab, was a fresh take on the subject, underlined by its deep intertextuality—there are five pages of sources for the allusions woven most inconspicuously into the body of the novel. It is through reading that Madeleine understands the world, and so she does, even when her brain chemistry means that she’s misreading and supposing that her baby has been replaced by some kind of double. She recalls leaving a window open in the hospital room the night before her daughter was transferred to the NICU, something something about foxes, a street cat called Greymalkin. She’s sleep deprived and isolated, cut off from who she’d been before the baby came, and her own unknown origins only compound the confusion, her sense of being wholly untethered from the chain of things that keep the planets in alignment.

In a lesser work, the changeling story would be a metaphor, a cutesy reduction of Madeleine’s situation, but in Queen Mab, the literary allusions enhance the story, and provide a vivid sense of how she interprets her reality. The reader follows her deeper and deeper into her detachment, Madeleine’s husband and parents unable to reach her, their helplessness apparent on the story’s margins, but Madeleine’s point of view stays fixed and front and centre, the story’s shift from first to third person narration just another way in which she gets away from herself.

Luminous, literary, intelligent, and surprising, Queen Mab was captivating, and disturbing in the best possible way.

September 10, 2026

The Little Way, by Carol Bruneau

Carol Bruneau’s latest novel, much like her celebrated fictionalization of the life of Maud Lewis, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, is a celebration of the ordinary extraordinary, those pockets of wonder and colour that a lesser writer might forget to notice. Set in contemporary Halifax, it’s a very “voice-y” novel from the point of view of Isla Fownes who, at age 49, has slept in the very same bedroom all her life in the historical home with water frontage on the city’s Northwest that she shares with her elderly father and her drifting daughter who’s just announced a surprise pregnancy. Like Lewis did, Isla “brightens the corner where she is” as a local florist, but sometimes the task seems overwhelming against a backdrop of climate disaster, social inequality, and runaway real-estate speculation. Thankfully she can take comfort in her new partner, a widower who’d washed up on her shores the autumn before when his sailboat sunk.

The Little Way is the story of a season, Bruneau writing Isla and her friends and family through their days, days filled with mundanity and miracles, trials and pleasures. It’s a novel that plays tricks with language, embracing the vernacular, and doesn’t hold its readers’ hands either, demanding close attention instead of breeziness, the way that the most important things always do.

September 6, 2026

A Great Day

Yesterday, I got to see Pitbull in the company of 15,000 other fans. It was wonderful.

On March 14, 2025, we were driving home from a visit to the the Royal Botanical Gardens, and a song played on our Spotify playlist that I’d somehow never heard before, performed by an artist I knew nothing about, including his area code (unbelievably). A new release, I’d assumed, because it had come on after Charli XCX, but it turned out the song was 12 years old and everybody in my family—in the world, even?—knew it, except for me.

“Why did nobody tell me about this?” is what I kept thinking in the days to follow when I wouldn’t stop playing it over and over.

That song was “Timber.” (Full credit to Kesha, without whom….)

Now, an essential detail of this story and of my whole “Come to Pitbull” moment was that by March 14, 2025, I was six weeks into a difficult bout of anxiety, my first experience of such a thing since the major episode on 2022 that almost broke me and made me realize that I had an dysfunctional relationship with anxiety in the first place. Watching the US government wreak havoc on the post-WW2 world order had once again sent me down a road of terror and existential dread that made ordinary functioning difficult and left me sad and scared all the time in a way whose disproportions I did not comprehend. It was awful.

But “Timber” made me happy, it really did, and everybody in my family was pleased about this development because during my previous bout with anxiety, I’d listened to Phil Collins over and over, and they all determined that Pitbull was a vast improvement.

And then Leon Musk put on a cheese hat and a Democrat won the Wisconsin senate race, I realized that the forces of evil were not necessarily omnipotent, and my anxiety lifted.

But Pitbull remained.

And I’ve loved Pitbull ever since, Mr. 305, Mr. Worldwide, a product of Dade County always. Not in such a way that I’m sure you’ll love him too, if you don’t already. My love for Pitbull makes no sense, and doesn’t map neatly onto anything, weird and incongruous. But Pitbull himself is weird and incongruous, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me. After having my mind broken by its insistence on absolutes, Pitbull showed me how to relax a bit, to hold multitudes. He has taught me that some things are simpler than they seem, and that there’s power in rejecting cynicism. That I *could* consider myself too smart and worldly for a platitude like “Every day above ground is a great day,” and yet there is truth in it, so why would I?

He’s author of the line, “This biggity boy’s a diggity dog.” He does not take himself too seriously, and yet he also comically takes himself way too seriously. His lyrics are super-sexualized, his dancers practically naked, and his female fans show up at his concerts in drag, dressed like him in bald caps. He’s spoken of spending his childhood driving around with his mother listening to Tony Robbins’ cassette tapes and used his private jet to fly cancer patients from Puerto Rico to the US for treatment after Hurricane Maria. He’s a caricature, but there’s something more there that’s oddly compelling. You should read Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, which tried to skewer the Pitbull persona, but could not bring itself to do so entirely at the end.

I love him so much, and I love the world better because he’s in it.

September 1, 2026

Cottage Reads 2.0

As I was somewhat disappointed in myself for my cottage book stack from July being so conventionally packed with new releases (which is not to say that The Shampoo Effect and Dolly All The Time are not incredible reads I now recommend to everyone—they are both SO GOOD), I decided to return to my own readerly foundation—PURSUE YOUR OWN CURIOUS AVENUES—for our most recent getaway. I love the challenge of putting together a book stack utterly unlike everybody else’s, off-beat and unexpected. A proper cottage book stack, to my mind, should be made up on books obtained in little free libraries, library book sales, or secondhand stores, preferably published in previous centuries. Front lists don’t belong at the lake.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie: This one came from our local Little Free Library, and was notable for being a book that every member of our family read on our week away. (Now that our youngest family member is 13, there are more of these and it’s delightful.) It all began when my eldest daughter, who is a murder mystery aficionado, read it, and was bowled over by the cleverness. She insisted that all of us had to read it so we could talk it with her, and perhaps the best part was everybody trying to predict the story’s outcome as they were reading and those of us who’d read it already replying, “Just keep going.” No one guessed the ending, which is remarkable for a novel wholly spoiled by its title.

A Mercy, by Toni Morrison: I loved this one, which I bought after it was selected as one of the New York Times’ best books of the century. Published in 2008, it’s set in the 1600s around the beginning of the slave trade, and the story of a young Black enslaved woman purchased by a man who’s ambivalent about slavery, and her connection to the wife of the man who buys her. While the story’s beginning is disorienting in its fragments, it actually comes together quite straightforwardly, and Morrison had tricked me into thinking I knew what to expect, which is never the case with any of her novels, steeped in a wonderfully throught-provoking moral ambiguity. What is the line between right and wrong, good and evil? Who gets to draw it. Troubling in the very best way.

Sisters By a River, by Barbara Comyns: A purchase from the Victoria College Booksale! I’ve read two previous novels by Comyns—Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter—and was curious about this re-release from Virago, her first book, a novel that’s really a collection of autobiographical vignettes from Comyns’ childhood with a father and mother who made Farve and Muv Mitford seem like helicopter parents. It’s a childhood of peril and cruelty, filled with nasty characters, and yet the narrative voice gives the whole thing a certain charm, which is the weirdest magic spell.

Temples of Delight, by Barbara Trapido: Trapido wrote the foreword to Comyns’ novel, so naturally I had to read her next. Barbara Trapido is such a strange writer, strange in a way I did not understand or appreciate when I read her the first time, appreciating something light and easy. And while there is indeed light and ease in Trapido’s work, there is also so much darkness, death, tragedy, dubious morality, and the contemporary English novel does not tend to be her template—I’ve actually already read the sequel to Temples of Delight, which was positively Shakespearean in its approach to theme and character, and this novel is a riff on The Magic Flute (although I cannot tell you how because I don’t know it). But oh, her work is wondrous to behold. I wish Trapido had been more prolific—I am sad that I only have one more of her novels before me. (Another Vic Booksale score!)

You Had Me At Hello, by Mhairi McFarlane: In some ways this one is the outlier of my stack, a contemporary rom-com, but there us something transgressive about how McFarlane pushes at the limits of the genre, making room for more, for deeper and sometimes darker storytelling, and besides this is her very first novel, and so backlist it is. And I loved it. McFarlane is one of my favourite chroniclers of modern life, of women’s friendships, and is oh so very funny, kind of my literary role model. An absolutely delight. (I found this one in my local LFL.)

The Knockout Queen, by Rufi Thorpe: Another more contemporary pick, the book Thorpe published before the smash hit Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It make think about my cottage stack and the common thread of people broken down by their lives and by society, and what happens when those people make the only choices they were ever going to make, which are the worst ones, ones with devastating consequences. (See Morrison!) Who are the freaks and monsters of the world, really? In some ways this is like a bizarro version of The Great Gatsby, set in the suburbs of Los Angeles, also troubling and violent, but utterly captivating and each of its broken messed up characters has incredible heart—but Thorpe pulls no punches either.

The Public Image, by Muriel Spark: This one was different from other Spark novels I’d read, seemingly more straightforward, less concerned with questions of religion and Catholicism that end up going over my heard anyway. But maybe not so straightforward after all because I gather that the protagonist was supposed to be a villain of sorts, a celebrity utterly consumed with her image to the point where she’s an empty shell, but I had real sympathy for her—perhaps the omnipresence of celebrity and fame in our current moment has normalized what’s wrong with her. She’s an actress of middling distinction who has ended up a genuine movie star, but then her less famous husband takes a vicious revenge. I don’t know if this is Spark at her best, but it was a good read anyway. (Another Vic Booksale find—and a North American first edition at that!)

Monkey Grip, by Helen Garner: I bought this one new awhile back, but it’s a reissue so you can’t fault me. A whole bunch of the Australian Garner’s books were republished recently, this one with an introduction by Lauren Groff. It’s set in the 1970s against a counter culture scene build on drugs and communal living, single mom Nora infatuated with the junkie Javo, and struggling to rectify her feelings of attachment to him with her desire to live freely. Her ambivalence is truly interesting, and while I tend to find narratives about people on drugs terrifically boring and parts of this were no exception to that rule, I really appreciated Nora’s story and Garner’s spare and unyielding prose, and how the novel connected to the questions of morality woven so interestingly into all the other novels I was reading.

Elizabeth Alone, by William Trevor: The Irish writer Trevor is most celebrated for his short stories, but the dark humour and rich poignancy of his early novels are my favourite, and this 1973 release was such a pleasure to read. Maybe I love Trevor because he writes women’s stories so beautifully, this one about four patients at a fiction London women’s hospital, the narrative weaving each of their stories and those of so many other characters in their lives, resulting in a tangled web of connections and disconnection, goodness and wickedness aplenty, and also grace. Rich and funny, so emotionally acute, and absolutely cutting.

(Bonus) The Unexpected Guest, by Agatha Christie: The audiobook we finished on the way home from our trip! We had an audiobook DNF on July’s journey, a book that was so long, and tended to send us to sleep, which was a problem if you’re driving a car. For this trip, we banked on a short book, a novel that was actually adapted from one of Christie’s plays. We loved it. And while the conclusion seemed to be settling into an unbearable predictability as we got closer to the end (which is what you get with a short mystery, perhaps, an uncomplicated wrap-up?), Christie swooped in with her plotting genius at the eleventh hour and blew our minds. SO GOOD!

August 21, 2026

A Literary Bouquet

I’ve been valuing the experience of a literary deep dive since two recent reads, but this doesn’t mean everything good requires deep immersion. At the same time, I’ve also been enjoying three other books in bits and pieces—a collection of short short stories, a poetry collection, and an essay collection—for the past few days, books that are in conversation with one another, and which probe mundanity in the wonderful sense of things of this world. These books aren’t just all about shiny things either (though there is much of this in each of them!), but instead grit, mud, mudslides, homeless encampments, racism, all of which are also things of this world, undeniably, and I think it’s these books’ capacities to hold all of it that really makes me believe in every word the authors say. Clear-eyed, wondering, wandering, curious—together a veritable literary bouquet.

• The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay
• A Mudlarker’s Diary, by Ariel Gordon
• Earthen, by Katherine Koller

August 20, 2026

Muskoka Road Trip

On Monday I was #DefinitelyThriving in Muskoka with the very best road trip crew—my kids! Stops at Manticore Books in Orillia and Cedar Canoe Books in Bracebridge for book signings and book BUYINGS. And Webers, of course. And then to beautiful Port Carling where Muskoka Lakes Public Library kicked off their week of 25th anniversary celebrations with a wonderful event with Cindy Watson interviewing me about my book and bringing out her Muskoka Authors Association community. I had the most wonderful time. And then dinner and a swim in Lake Muskoka. Perfection all around.

August 19, 2026

Whistler, by Ann Patchett

It just so happened that I ran out of things to do on Friday afternoon, which is a situation that I don’t encounter very often, and it also just so happened that I had a hammock and a copy of Ann Patchett’s new book, Whistler, with which to fill that little window of time that had just opened in my life. I’d started reading Whistler the night before, and I was already in its thrall, and settled into my hammock to savour the rest, the experience recalling the time I barrelled through most of The Dutch House in the bathtub. And I can’t help but think that this is the best way to read Ann Patchett, to eliminate all other distractions and wholly submit to the narrative, letting the novel hold you, the way a bathtub or a hammock might. I don’t have a photo of the novel taken in the hammock, my feet popping up in the background to affirm that all this is a true story, because my phone was far away, and the story of Daphne’s encounter with an elderly man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and everything that happened after that became my whole wide world.

I love this novel. It’s so strange, and slow, and breaks all the core rules of novel writing—especially TWO CHARACTERS TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED DOES NOT MAKE A SCENE. The whole novel is characters talking about things that happened, things that happened decades ago but what makes it so compelling is the revelations that arrive with the telling, revelations that re-frame everything the characters thought they knew about themselves and each other.

And I think it’s a novel that really benefits from singular focus, from being able to sink deeply into it. (I liked Tom Lake a lot, but I was reading it in bits and pieces, and these novels are best appreciated as wholes.) Patchett’s narrative voice is one that holds the reader so carefully, precisely, assuredly—the same way that Daphne and her stepfather were held on a hillscape all those years ago, trapped in their car which had gone off the road, stopped midway down, the car on its side, and any sudden movement might trigger the car to roll further. The same way that Daphne is held by the story her stepfather tells her during that long night while they’re waiting for light. The same way that I was held by my hammock as I read Whistler last Friday, into the evening, absolutely riveted by the strangeness of the story, the unlikeliness and specificity that makes it read as true, that makes its ending simultaneously unbearable, and also one of the most glorious stories I’ve ever read in my life.