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Reading / Life
Three things for now. First, I just finished reading Erika Swyler’s Light from Other Stars and I’m picking myself up off the floor, as we speak. There are books that seem to have so much of the author’s heart in them that it feels an extraordinary privilege to read. I admired The Book of Speculation…
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Reading/Life
I’ve been keeping busy here out in the prairies. Work and children and the ever-evolving news cycle, which is so horrific at this point that I’m not even going to make vague references to prove the fact that I am a qualifiably Engaged Person, and you’ll just have to trust me that I’m reading the…
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What I’ve Been Reading Lately
Conversations with Friends This is one of those books that make me doubt my own taste, but in a good way? Maybe? It was so hype-y and I’m always so eye-roll-y about hype-y books. And I read the description and thought “I wouldn’t like this book.” And I read reviews and thought “Neh. Not for…
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Review: Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
Afia Atakora’s debut novel, set in the rural South, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, is a complex exploration of the deeply held tensions and continual trials that infuse a small, isolated community of former slaves. The story centres around Rue, who has inherited the position of midwife and healer from her mother,…
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Review: Lakewood by Megan Giddings
When Lena Johnson is invited to participate in a research study that will pay all her bills and provide for a future that is beyond comfortable, it is an impossible offer to pass up. A college student whose grandmother passed away leaving a pile of medical bills, and whose mother, Deziree, suffers from a mysterious…
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Some Notes on The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane & Jackie Morris
This year Santa sent a beautiful book to our family,* and I had to stop and write a few words about it because it has become a favorite evening ritual, and reading it aloud to our sons has made me stop and think about things like why we read aloud and how verbalizing certain things…
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What I’ve Been Reading Lately
Hello there! Hope you are all enjoying a warm and wonderful holiday time, sharing good food and good stories with dear ones, baiting Santa Claus with sugar cookies, and maybe cracking the spine of that novel that’s been sitting on your shelf for the last six months… As for my household, we are delightfully non-mobile…
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Reading Notes: Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz
I’ve been slowly progressing through this remarkable book over the last couple of years. As an academic work that spans several fields–sociology, economic theory, culture studies, and literary theory (with a smattering of psychoanalysis)–it is fairly dense. So I’ve been picking it up here and there, reading a chapter and then letting it sit for…
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Edward Clug’s Carmina Burana
Hi, how are you, I recently discovered that dance criticism has been dead since 2015 and I’m real sad about it. How did I discover this very under-the-radar tragedy? I went to see Edward Clug’s Carmina Burana the other night–produced by Montreal’s Grands Ballets, along with another Clug piece, Stabat Mater on the program–and when…
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Review: Away! Away! by Jana Beňová
I had the great pleasure of reviewing Jana Beňová’s award-winning novella Seeing People Off a couple of years ago, over at Necessary Fiction. It is an excellent, genre-defying, language-experimenting work with a compelling woman at its centre. So I was very excited to pick up Away! Away! Which is similarly genre-defying, language-experimenting, and also driven…
Indirect Libre
books etc., emphasis on the etc.
Indirect Libre 