The Time In Between – David Bergen

Actually finished this one last Sunday but can’t stop thinking about it.  This book was a Giller prize winner and my lucky find at the recent Calgary Reads booksale ($1 trade paperback wow!).
I usually start reading a book not knowing what exactly the book is about.  I’m pretty awful for going with what I’ve recognized [...]

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Like G.G. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, this book is definitely not for people with ADD, i.e. North Americans, in general.  The language is languid to the point of feeling like one has gotten a lobotomy without having felt the scalpel.
It took me four months to read this book piecemeal on the morning and [...]

The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee

Just finished this book today.  A lovely book, just the right length.  I picked it up at the Twice Told Tales (I think that’s the name of the store) because the lady had a list of the Man Booker prize winners up and this book was sitting on the shelf nearby.  Plus I had read [...]

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

So after the anger-inducing, depression-mongering Anne Sexton biography, I’m taking a stab at a new author, Tom Perrotta.  The cover of this book intrigued me, albeit is a movie cover (I’m assuming since it has real people on the cover and a seal-looking thingy in the top left corner yelling “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE”.  [...]

The Hour I First Believed – Wally Lamb

I got this book for Christmas, as I made a plea for only two books for presents and my husband was kind enough to buy them for me.
So maybe I should check and see what the book is actually about before I request it. 
Wally Lamb – I loved his other two books She’s Come Undone [...]

Fjords and Lists of Lists of and Books

I have an awesome friend, Tyg, I’ve never seen.  Literally.  In this day and age of Googling and letting your fingers do the typing, I have no idea what my friend looks like beyond written description (he’s Norwegian, so I can make some safe assumptions…kind of!).  People seem to find this fascinating for some odd reason.  [...]

The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut

So this is what I’m reading next.  I always think it’s a good idea to reward myself with something I know will be fun after a read that has been more of a chore.  I unlearned the art of ‘letting go’ a dry read and steeled myself in the last two years to plough through, [...]

Obasan – Joy Kogawa

Just about finished this one….and I’m pretty glad to be done, frankly.  The writing isn’t bad, the story isn’t awful but I’m finding it hard to keep my concentration while reading.  Here’s the premise:  narrator Naomi, small girl, caught up in the middle of the rounding up of the Japanese Canadians during World War II.  [...]

The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck

Finished up with this one last Wednesday.  Don’t you hate that when you tote a book to work and are prepared to read it through the lunch hour and it turns out there are only four pages left to read because the rest is commentary?  So I spent the rest of the time picking pith [...]

“The Vision” from Men and Cartoons – Jonathan Lethem

Have I mentioned that I love short stories?  Short stories saved my sanity during the drudgery of the semester of British Fiction 330, Physics 101, Calculus 112, Chemistry 110, and Cell Biology 240.  Passed one, failed two, dropped one, and scraped by in one by the seat of my periodic table. 
Short stories are made even [...]