An important book that I dipped into years ago, but have only now read completely, is Janice Radway’s Reading the romance. It’s brilliant in its thoughtfulness about a subject—women’s reading of romance novels—that is usually dismissed without much thought.
You don’t have to press Bob Mersereau to talk tunes. As soon as the idea of chatting about music forms, he’s off, rattling off interesting anecdotes, funny stories and facts about bands you know well and probably some you have never heard of. A music columnist and longtime arts reporter for CBC, he has years of knowledge to pull from, and his latest project allowed the music geek to continue his journey through music history - specifically Canadian music history.
Eric Lewis//The Times-Transcript
“I thought to myself, ‘If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.’ ”
John Barber/Globe and Mail
Our history with…[beer]… is long and colourful. Author Ian Coutts has documented it with his new book Brew North: How Canadians Made Beer and Beer Made Canada.
Jesse Skinner/Toro Magazine
It doesn’t matter how many kerplows, superpowers or evil villains you stuff into a graphic novel—if it doesn’t have a sense of humanity and a strong heart, who cares?
Sue Carter Flinn/The Coast
Our cabbie likes to mix things up by reading both fiction and nonfiction; new releases and older volumes; serious tomes and lighter fare; and, of course, a healthy helping of whatever people leave in the back of his cab. Here’s a list of what Will Grozier loves right now, books that captivate whether you’re poring over them on the beach or sampling them on a short taxi ride.
NPR
Growing up in downtown Tel Aviv, Avi Friedman got a sense of what a real neighbourhood is all about: urban living on a human scale. The family’s fourth-floor apartment was in a Bauhaus building that was classic mixed-use: stores at street level, apartments and offices above. School was around the corner and so was a large public market. It’s the kind of environment that Friedman, now 58 and an established Montreal architect and author, has sought out ever since.
JEFF HEINRICH/The Gazette
Principally, what makes this lecture series good, is Spurgin’s strong and thoughtful suggestion that reading fiction is an art in something like the way that writing fiction is an art. He introduces what he calls a set of tools that can be used by the reader to think about a piece of fiction during reading.
NSCAD graduate and Burning Rock member Lisa Moore is the reigning queen of CanLit. Few writers can match her evocative, elegant way with words, and for that she is a multi-award-winning author, twice nominated for the country’s most esteemed literary award: the Giller Prize.
February is her latest novel, said to be her masterpiece, and Salty Ink certainly thinks so.
