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William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Grey Mass Hung Over a Chunk of Canadian History
Reviewed in this essay: King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny by Allan Levine. D&M Publishers Inc., 2011. William Lyon Mackenzie King exists only dimly in our collective consciousness, as a kind of great grey mass hung over a rather substantial chunk of political history. Refreshingly, Allan Levine’s new…
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Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
Reviewed in this essay: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Google. Huffington. Sports scores. Twitter. Text. Blog, blog, blog. Twitt—PHONE CALL!—Email. Facebook. Twitter . . . Does this read like the score of activities that occupy just two minutes of your day? In his Pulitzer-nominated book, The Shallows: What…
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Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live by Ray Robertson
Reviewed in this essay: Why Not? Fifteen Reason to Live by Ray Robertson. Biblioasis, 2011. It is November in Toronto. I could use fifteen or so reasons to live right now. Ray Robertson implies a big answer with his new title. Having just completed a draft of a novel and experiencing an OCD-induced depression, Robertson…
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Charles P. Pierce’s Sports Guy
Reviewed in this essay: Sports Guy by Charles P. Pierce. Da Capo Press, 2000. The stock image of a sportswriter is of a person wearing an ugly shirt, with strong opinions on football defences and who writes recaps of games that all seem to come from the same script: who won, who lost, who scored…
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A World Elsewhere, by Wayne Johnson
Reviewed in this essay: A World Elsewhere by Wayne Johnson. Knopf Canada, 2011. A tale of fathers, real and make-believe, is the backbone of Johnson`s new novel. Landish Druken is an exile at home, estranged from his father, starving in a garret, writing a book that he burns every night. On the edge of Dark…
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The Sudden Departure of Normal Life: A Review of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers
Reviewed in this essay: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. Random House of Canada, 2011. Four years after The Abstinence Teacher, and seven years after the massive success of Little Children, Tom Perrotta is back with The Leftovers, a novel that manages to strike just the right balance between complete absurdity and dozy normality in his…
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The Magicians and The Magician King: Review
Reviewed in this essay: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Viking Press, 2009. The Magician King by Lev Grossman. Viking Press, 2011. Lev Grossman’s books The Magicians and The Magician King are fantasy as it ought to be: dark, funny, and brilliantly realized. The books cannot avoid comparisons to Harry Potter — geeky boy, magical school,…
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How to Make $100,000 and Infinite Units of Charm
The Victoria College Book Sale—one of the great used book sales put on annually by University of Toronto colleges—is a fine example of how to make $100,000 in a single weekend while turning out vast quantities of enchantment and love. Outside the slick infinity of Googlebooks there is a world of heavy old paper things…
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Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood: “When Information is Cheap, Attention is Expensive”
Written by Pulitzer short-lister and National Book Award-finalist James Gleick, The Information sets out to offer an informative information history. Beginning in a pre-literate world when any “information” vanished as soon as it appeared, Gleick presents an account of talking drums in Africa, a widely misunderstood but incredibly advanced mode of communication. Gleick then moves…
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Anna Karenina, her Android, the Aliens and the Train
A review of Android Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters. Quirk Books, 2010.
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David Lurie on Early Japanese Books
On March 18, 2011, Columbia University Professor David Lurie spoke in the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series at the University of Toronto on “Titles of the Current Realm: Script, Language, and the Earliest Japanese Bibliographies.” [audio:davidlurie.mp3]