Monthly Archives: September 2017

September 2017 (see also February 2022 and subsequent on a separate post) 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 … 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 →