Monthly Archives: April 2013

Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84. Knopf New York 2011. F; 2/12. Another book in translation, and what a fascinating follow-up to my reading of his short stories (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.). The protagonists are a couple, starting as nerdy ten-year-olds in school. … Continue reading →

Verghese, Abraham. Cutting for Stone. Vintage Toronto 2009. F; 03/12. I come at this one with my usual envious mixed feelings reading a successful doctor who is also a very successful writer. It is hard to completely clear away the … Continue reading →

Ford, Richard. Independence Day. Vintage Canada 2001 (original 1995) F;03/12 Another book that I seem to miss by a small margin for some reason. There must be a literary name for this type of character: lost in middle age. He’s … Continue reading →

Hadler N. Rethinking Aging. U of N Carolina Press 2011. N;04/12. I’m of two minds about this interesting book. Mind one: he gets it. Understands that we have a deadly medical system that arrogates everything unto itself, and in doing … Continue reading →

Ondaatje, Michael. The Cat’s Table. McClelland and Stewart Toronto 2011. F; 05/12. I loved this. I was underwhelmed by a couple of his other novels, but here he pulls it together spectacularly. It’s a retrospective narrative by a writer we … Continue reading →

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Vintage Toronto 2011. F;05/12. This Booker Prize winner is very short for a novel but packs quite a slug, although it ends up impacting the target more like birdshot not quite at close … Continue reading →

Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion. Vintage Canada 2009. NF;5/12. I don’t know who Chris Hedges is, but he’s presented on the book jacket as Pulitzer prize-winning senior academic, although he is a journalist-correspondent. This looked intriguingly like a bright exposé … Continue reading →

Thomas, Michael. Man Gone Down. Black Cat 2007. F;5/12. I thought at first Thomas might be like Zsuzsi Gartner: a starting-out author who hasn’t found his feet yet, but I ended up feeling that really he’s in the wrong genre. … Continue reading →

Benaron, Naomi. Running the Rift. HarperCollins Toronto, 2012. F;05/12 This is another book I loved in spite of irrational worries engendered by the book jacket that the author was going to be a self-inflating bore. She’s a scientist (an Earth … Continue reading →

MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Random House New York 2001. NF; 06/12. I don’t read much history and took only one university course in it, so most of the major events of the 20th century … Continue reading →