When the CBR team talked on Facebook about highlighting Canadian books for Canada Day, I went down a rabbit hole with some of the CanLit on my bookshelves. I have been mired in a Brandon Sanderson behemoth, but decided to quickly write up a review of one that I could both reread relatively quickly and hadn’t read in some time. I sat there, and Unless was right in front of my eyes, having been untouched for probably ten years. So here we are. The interesting […]
A sweet goodbye
I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks and his writing for decades. When that first beautiful NYT article came out in early 2015 and revealed he was dying from cancer, I essentially hid my head in the sand and refused to read anything else from him for a long time. He was warm and kind and insightful and passionate and I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. The day of Anthony Bourdain’s death, I walked into my library and On the Move was sitting […]
So close!
I really loved Andy Weir’s The Martian – it was fast paced, it was funny, the science was compelling, and the diary format really worked in terms of telling the story and highlighting Mark’s isolation. I was very excited to receive this book from my Secret Book Santa; Artemis should have been a sure fire hit for me. But it wasn’t, this time. This is a caper story, in essence, set on a city called Artemis that is located on the moon. The city is […]
Who let me start on another fantasy series?
I really liked the first in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series, The Way of Kings, so of course I went all in and requested the second from the library before I was even finished the first. I almost had regrets – I have a pile of Christmas book exchange books waiting for me, each of them so tempting. But, the book came quickly, I already owe $25 in library fines, and so I got started. At the end of the first book, the stage was […]
Trying for more yes
I don’t watch a lot of television on the whole, and hour long dramas are not really my cup of tea, so I have missed most of Shonda Rimes’ work. Despite this, I do of course know who she is and admire her enormous success, talent and determination. This is absolutely not the kind of book I would normally read; self-help, memoirs, etc are not my cup of tea, but someone left it in a pile of free books at work and I thought I […]
It sounded scary at first
I had only heard of Brandon Sanderson a few times prior to fall 2017, mostly in relation to his having finished the Wheel of Time series. I never paid very much attention to him, because I haven’t read that series and I kind of felt like I have had enough of white Mormon men and their novels for one lifetime (O.S.C. – I’m looking at you, FOREVER). However, when friends whose taste in books I trust started to get excited about the third in Sanderson’s […]