October 29, 2008
Links for Today
Sandra Martin’s full-length obituary of Constance Rooke was beautiful, and told the story of an extraordinary person who was an extraordinary reader. GG Nominee Rivka Galchen profiled in The Globe. I loved Lisa Moore’s review of Anne Enright’s Yesterday’s Weather. An interview with John Updike in The Guardian. Where are the woman with big ideas? Claire Cameron thinks they moved to Canada. And “Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill” –on Sarah Palin in the London Review of Books— is terrifying.
October 23, 2008
Linky Places
The best thing lately is FontPark, in which you can create pictures out of kanji. With sound effects! So fun. And then Rebecca Rosenblum reading Weetzie Bat to the world. Sarah Liss on Sarah McLachlan, and how she got her heart broke. (People who read this article also read “Man accidentally shoots himself in head with crossbow”, incidentally.) Ivor Tossell’s bits on the internet that just won’t die. Ringing so true: “An Invective against birthday dinners”. Pickle Me This faves Atmospheric Disturbances, Skim and Nikolski are up for Governor General’s Literary Awards (for fiction, children’s literature, and translation, respectively). And finally, I am about a begin reading a paranormal suspense novel. So stayed tuned for details of that…
October 1, 2008
Boydens
Currently reading the like-nothing-I’ve-ever-read-before Babylon Rolling by Amanda Boyden. Boyden and her husband Joseph Boyden are profiled at the CBC.
September 25, 2008
Astrobiology
From our Rap Songs Commissioned to Drum Up Interest for Unfashionable Topics file (see Hip Hop Wordsworth Squirrel), we bring you “Astrobiology”, NASA’s rap about the search for life in outer space.
September 17, 2008
How fortunate
Oooh, Giller Longlist. And I’ve read not a one. How fortunate, however, that only three of them are by women, and I can only ever be bothered to read books by women, so my bedside stack won’t stack too intimidatingly (and topple in the night and kill me in my sleep, etc.). Indeed, I did somehow find myself in a bookshop today, standing at the cash clutching The Boys in the Trees and Good to a Fault. I’ve been meaning to read the first one for ages, as it’s been recommended by esteemed readers Maud Newton, Stephany Aulenback and Rona Maynard. Of the second book, I know nothing, but the blubs were all by authors I liked, and so I thought, Why not?
September 5, 2008
Eden Mills & Weekend
We’ve got a packed weekend here, with three (3!) social engagements tomorrow: out for brunch, friends for tea (with a baby!) and then a friend for dinner.
On Sunday I’m off for the day to the Eden Mills Writers Festival with Rebecca Rosenblum. I am looking forward to hearing Rebecca read (from her forthcoming book, out in over a week), and other writers too, including Shari Lapena, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Mariko Tamaki, Susan Juby and Leon Rooke. Looking forward also to the announcement of the winner of the 2008 Literary Contest, particularly as my short story “Still Born Friends” is on the shortlist!
September 5, 2008
Choice
From Gary Younge of The Nation: “The fact is, Bristol could make the decision to keep the baby only because, in legal terms at least, she had a choice. A choice, as it happens, that her mother wants to criminalize… The woman who would like us to keep her daughter’s pregnancy a private matter is running for office so that she can make the pregnancies of other people’s daughters an affair of the state. ” (via Broadsides).
September 3, 2008
Links and more links
The best thing we read all weekend at our house was “Just Two Clicks: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle” in the LRB. Hilary Mantel’s “In the Waiting Room” (not avail. online) was similarly awful, but beautiful to read. Katherine Parrish thoughtfully raises the topic of gender and The Salon Des Refuses, which I didn’t mention, but it certainly occurred to me: “John Metcalf’s excoriating indictment of the Penguin Anthology accuses the publishers of “pulling a Binchy,” comparing their choice of a mere practitioner like Jane Urquhart to a hypothetical decision to ask Maeve Binchy to edit a comparable Irish anthology. Why not Frank McCourt, I wondered… Whimsical women with their stories. Serious men with their ideas. Ahhh. The good old days.” Rona Maynard’s “Dear Governor Palin” is powerful and smart. And Lynn Crosbie on the resurrection of Brenda Walsh. Now reading Hilary Mantel’s novel An Experiment in Love.
September 1, 2008
Readers Reading
I’m the reader reading today over at Julie Wilson’s marvelous Seen Reading. Click through to hear me reading from my favourite novel Unless, stumbling over the words only minimally with the sound of a waterfall in the background.
