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Bookishness: Week of August 20, 2012
It was a terrible and overwrought sentence This year’s Bulwer-Lytton winner. The Pussy Riot reading list The literature that inspires Pussy Riot. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures Ira Glass (coming to Toronto in October) on books and reading and movies and more. “I didn’t actually finish the book.” An interview…
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David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: A Guide to the Vexed
Reviewed in this essay: Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey. Verso Press, 2012. The scale and frequency of the urban protest movements of the last two years has overshadowed anything since the 1960’s. It was perhaps simpler then than it is now to conceive of what…
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Bookishness: Week of August 13, 2012
!! I once decided to entirely abandon use of the exclamation mark. This lasted until I got an office job and realized that my refusal to use the offending punctuation would likely lead my colleagues thinking me humourless if not plain mean, and they would never invite me for expensive lattes in the afternoons. I…
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Oh Hello SummerWorks! Win tickets to Ajax (por nobody)
Huzzah, Toronto—SummerWorks festival begins tonight! We’re looking forward in particular to Sean Dixon’s France, or the Niqab, inspired by one of the beloved Tabatha Southey’s columns, as well as TRB contributor Zack Russell’s staging of the famously “unstageable” Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan. In Tuan’s play, which promises sex games, water fights, and pomegranates, “Four people get together for…
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On Goldstein’s Novels of Ideas: Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner
This piece continues a series of reviews highlighting philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s list of the best “novels of ideas”. Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner was the third entry on her list. Reviewed in this essay: The Holy Sinner, Thomas Mann. Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter. Knopf, 1951. When The Holy Sinner was published in English in…
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Bookishness: Week of August 6, 2012
“Wonderful things happen when your brain is empty.” Maira Kalman on the difference between thinking and feeling. A little too much imagining for non-fiction Author of the (until now) best-selling Imagination: How Creativity Works Jonah Lehrer has admitted to inventing quotes in the book. The publisher has pulled the title, and is issuing refunds. Poets in…
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Choice and Consequence in Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period
Reviewed in this essay: Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period by Stephen Marche. The Walrus Online Exclusive, November 2010. In Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period, Stephen Marche’s digital novel currently available on The Walrus website, the question of personal choice is explored in the form of an unwanted pregnancy experienced by the titular character. Lucy wants to change…
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Bookishness: Week of July 30, 2012
Book keeping “To my mother, libraries smell of a Britain waking up from rationing, and induce an extreme and horrifying existential anxiety. ‘Here is Everything You Will Never Read’ shout the dusty tomes. For me, ever the optimist, libraries represent the blissful, undestroyed promise of Everything I Am Yet To Discover.” Susanna Hislop, in an agony of…
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The History of Reading as Told by Students at the University of Toronto
This last semester I taught a course called “Readers and Readerships” to close to a hundred and fifty bright young Torontonians. A core second-year course in the Book and Media Studies program at the University of Toronto, the class surveyed the history of Western reading from the pre-history of writing to the present. We…
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Bookishness: Week of July 23, 2012
Reading at the table Dinah Fried’s Fictitious Dishes features meals from novels recreated and photographed. At right: Holden Caulfield’s drug store sandwich and malted. A flourish here and a curlicue there On a trend in book covers. Harlequin in steamy water The publisher is facing a class-action suit alleging that it has underpaid authors on digital royalties. “It’s a book about a…
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The Fifty Shades Phenomenon is Nothing New
Over two and a half centuries before British TV executive and mother of two, E.L. James, shocked the literary world with the massive success her Fifty Shades trilogy, a fifty-one year old English widower named Samuel Richardson wrote an epistolary novel called Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. Not only did Richardson’s novel become the biggest literary…
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Bookishness: Week of July 16, 2012
Delightful A book fountain in Budapest. Poems like lace Actually, lace poems. 3608 keys Speaking as a former piano student and also as someone who has moved houses four times in the past five years, I can tell you that keyboards, even those with 88 weighted keys, are not pianos. For all those who, like…