Monthly Archives: September 2017

September 2017. Our daughter moved to the Bay Area south of San Francisco awhile ago, and so we are learning about the string of small cities west of the Bay that have exploded with significance thanks to Google, Facebook, etc: … Continue reading →

September 2017 This is a high-class big-city Italian restaurant that delivers very good food in a busy efficient atmosphere. It’s located in the California Street financial district beside a couple of other interesting places to eat: Michael Mina, and the … Continue reading →

O’Mahony, Seamus. The Way We Die Now. St Martin’s, New York, 2016. NF;9/17. Stephen Pinker tells us that when we read we are looking for the author. We want that is to know who this person is and what we think … Continue reading →

Baldwin, Gary. Yiddish for Pirates. Penguin Random House, Toronto. 2016. F;9/17. This is a riotous, joking, silly, serious, picaresque, rollick of an odyssey. You can see aging impishness in the online pictures of the author’s face, and he has an … Continue reading →

September 2017 This is certainly an unusual place, unique in my experience in Vancouver. It’s a tiny hole in the wall on one of the west end’s one-block pedestrian-only streets, just off Davie, and presents itself credibly as the “real” … Continue reading →

September 2017 This may be the first attempt at serious “European-inspired” cuisine on the Sunshine Coast, and it succeeds. Partially. The space is a converted old cottage, former site of (and a marked improvement on) Sita’s Spag Shack, far enough … Continue reading →

Whittall, Zoe. The Best Kind of People. Anansi, Toronto, 2016. F;9/17. Overvalued ideas is a psychiatric term referring to the kind of thing that drives eating disorders. We all have them, although most of the time they don’t do much … Continue reading →

Awad, Mona. 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. Penguin, Canada, Toronto, 2016. F;9/17. I’m reading the novels shortlisted for the Canadian Giller prize in 2016. I was pretty taken with the winner Do Not Say We Have Nothing … Continue reading →

September, 2017. In years gone by we went to this place regularly, and it was briefly a darling of Vancouver Magazine’s annual restaurant classification. I’m not sure why we haven’t been there for six or eight years, except that it’s … Continue reading →

Mahajan, Karan. The Association of Small Bombs. Viking Penguin, New York, 2016. F;8/17. I didn’t like this book for two reasons. First, this writer crosses, and spends a lot of time on the wrong side of, the line between sharp … Continue reading →