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Freedom to Read Week in Toronto: A guide
Though some of you will no doubt choose to celebrate Freedom to Read week in Toronto by exercising your freedom to stay home and read (for which we would never fault you), the week of Feb. 24-Mar. 2, 2013, does promise a thrilling roster of events about censorship and books to draw you out of…
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Sheet music, Sriracha, and the Harry Potter Alliance: Bookishness for Feb. 25, 2013
Pencils, penises, pigeons, goblins, Hitler, and tea cosies What will be the oddest book title of the year? An army of fans, activists, nerdfighters, teenagers, wizards and muggles: fighting with love “Did you ever wish Harry Potter was real? Well it kind of is.” Join the Harry Potter Alliance and fight for social justice. Soooooo…
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Hope at life’s end: Michael Haneke’s Amour
Reviewed in this Essay: Amour. Written and Directed by Michael Haneke. Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuele Riva, and Isabelle Huppert. Running time: 127 minutes. Mainstream cinema often treats death with cosmic reverence or ignores it altogether, but Michael Haneke’s Amour forces its viewers to confront mortality, as intimately and physically as possible. The film is nominated for five Academy…
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Office patois: Business language and what it means to speak it
Ah, business language. It is a concept that gets more interesting the longer you consider it. Native to the office environment, it is a linguistic transition that individuals in a professional setting just automatically consent to as a group. They engage in a mass translation of simple everyday thoughts into a jumbled creation of formal…
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Hatchet jobs, Toronto Talks, and authors becoming subjects: Bookishness for Feb. 19, 2013
The Subjects Take four artists, add four scientists, subtract a bunch of sleep = this. “The prize is a year’s supply of potted shrimp” 2013’s Hatchet Job of the Year awarded to Camilla Long for her review of Aftermath, by Rachel Cusk. “Ambitious participatory event” alert “On Wednesday, February 20, Authors at Harbourfront Centre will…
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Canada Reads 2013: And the winner is…
It was the last day of Canada Reads 2013, the last chance for actor Jay Baruchel and comedian Trent McLellan to pitch their chosen books as the one all Canadians should have on their nightstands. And at 10:53 am, after a lively and sometimes venomous debate, the winner was declared: February, by Lisa Moore. “I…
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Canada Reads 2013: Debate Day 3
And we’re down to the last pair! After the third day of Canada Reads 2013, only Two Solitudes and February remain in contention for the big prize. Indian Horse, an audience darling and the early favourite to win, was voted out today, leaving Jay Baruchel and Trent McLellan to duke it out tomorrow in this…
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Touching from a distance: On Sam Pink’s Rontel
Reviewed in this essay: Rontel, by Sam Pink, Electric Literature, 2013. One of the old canards people trot out when waxing (prematurely) on the creeping death of the publishing industry is that there’s just no way to sell books anymore, not when brick and mortar stores are on the wane and even the once future-proof…
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Letter to Toronto from San Francisco: OMG Brandon Sanderson
Yesterday we got a very interesting letter from an old friend in San Francisco urging all us Northern readers to go to the Toronto repeat of an event they just had in town: a book-launch appearance by Brandon Sanderson, second author of the now-complete The Wheel of Time series. Sanderson will be at the Lillian…
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Canada Reads 2013: Debate Day 2
On Day 2 of the Canada Reads debates, Jane Urquart’s Away was banished to the dustbin of unsuccessful entrants, Indian Horse maintained its dominance in the public polls, and February began to look like the panelists’ favourite book. After a relatively staid first day of debates yesterday, the contest heated up today as panelists were…
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Canada Reads 2013: Debate Day 1
The stakes were high. It was only the first day of the Canada Reads 2013 debates but by the end of the first round, one of the five contending books would be eliminated by a panel vote. Between the presence of an Olympic wrestler, and Ron MacLean having shown up wearing Hell’s Angel-grade motorcycle boots, there…
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Bookishness: Week of February 11, 2013
Trans(it)media “When I started standing on subway platforms and watching people looking at the screens, I realized that the people who watch the screens are mostly commuters who take the same path to work every day and see those screens everyday in a ritualized way,” said Switzer. “An interesting way to reach out to those…