Zero History
I’m really enjoying reading William Gibson’s latest, Zero History, which includes such lovely bits of writing as this: He looked down at the screen, the glowing map. Saw it as a window into the city’s underlying fabric, as though he held something from which a rectangular chip of London’s surface had been pried, revealing a [...]
Toronto’s Yesterdays
My friend and neighbour Doug Taylor has just finished his latest book about the history of Toronto, There Never Was a Better Time: Toronto’s Yesterdays. It covers the history of an immigrant family in Toronto during the 1920′s, a dynamic time of urban expansion in the city. Doug is doing a reading from the book [...]
Book Review: The Last Patriot
I should know that any book that compares fundamentalist Islam to Nazism twice in the first half of the book is going to be a bit of a knee-jerk, flag-waving, post-9/11, pro-American piece of thriller fluff. That being said, The Last Patriot wasn’t the worst piece of knee-jerk, flag-waving, post-9/11, pro-American piece of thriller fluff [...]
Book review: Stuck in Downward Dog
My first book to review from MiniBookExpo, and I picked a light “chick-lit” read to complement the summer weather: Stuck in Downward Dog. Chantel Simmons’ debut novel is a pleasant, humourous read about Mara Brennan, a mid-20′s woman who hits a rough patch — job, boyfriend, apartment, friends — and gets through it while learning [...]
MiniBookExpo for Bloggers
Wow, it’s been over 3 months since I posted here: work and travel have taken up most of my time. I have a ton of billable work to do over the summer, but there’s always time for reading. A couple of years ago, I rediscovered the Toronto Public Library, which was a godsend for me [...]
Cory Doctorow’s Overclocked
Cory Doctorow has released his latest book, a collection of short stories called Overclocked. I’ve listened to most of these short stories on Doctorow’s podcasts, but I like to read things in print as well. Luckily, he gives us a choice: buy the book, listen to the stories in podcast installments (for free on iTunes), or [...]
The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud)
I know that I said in my review of jPod that there are few books that I don’t finish once starting them: The Emperor’s Children is one of those rarities. I struggled through about half of the book, wading through the overly-complex and pompous wording and characters that I really didn’t care that much about, [...]
jPod (Douglas Coupland)
My LibraryThing icon in the sidebar has been pretty busy lately; I arrived home on the 10th after being away for a month and found that three of the books that I had put on reserve at the library had already come and gone, and four more were ready to be picked up. I love [...]
Funny, funny writer
I’m not sure how funny that John McPhee intends to be in his book Uncommon Carriers, which I’m reading right now. It’s a book wherein he travels around in all sorts of unusual vehicles, starting with a cross-country trip in an 18-wheeler. His prose is really lovely, very readable, and occasionally very funny. For example, [...]
LibraryThing
Check out the new widget in my sidebar, just below the photos, called “What I’m Reading”. It’s generated from LibraryThing, where I can enter in books that I have in my library — using some very easy search tools that check Amazon and a number of other sources, so that I can just enter the [...]
