FEATHER by Elisabeth Belliveau

A common complaint is that children's books, especially high-quality picture-books, cost so much. All I can say is that they cost less than a dinner out, or a new pair of jeans. The books I read as a child transformed me, gave meaning and perspective to my experiences, and helped to mould whatever imaginative, intellectual or creative strengths I can lay claim to now. No doll or game had that impact on me, no pair of jeans ever changed my life.

- Michelle Landsberg

MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS by Michael Chabon

We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared.

All I want for Xmas...The Year of the Flood and The Other Boleyn Girl

posted by Josee Corrigan

This holiday I have taken the time to sit around and read.  Lucky for me, I received two loaner books just in time for the break - The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory and The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.  I flashed through Gregory's novel in a matter of days; it is an engrossing tale of the lives of Mary, Anne and George Boleyn, three Boleyn siblings attending the court of Henry VIII.  We know the story of Anne, who met the chopping block within a few years of her brief time as Henry's second wife; alternately, this book explores the story of her rise and fall from the perspective of Mary, Anne's younger sister.  Gregory's novel details the life at Henry's turbulent court: the intrigues and the scandals, his separation from the Roman Church to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine and marry Anne, his obsession with providing a male heir to England, and the extreme ambition driving the Howard family (and their daughters) into the King's court and bed to further their status in 16th Century English society.  I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading the sequels to this book - The Queen's Fools, The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and The Other Queen.

On an entirely different, futuristic track, I am halfway through Margaret Atwood's newest novel, The Year of the Flood.  I can't say I love it, but I cannot stop reading it!  It is quietly creepy and ultimately apocalyptic.  Like the prequel, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood weaves a wickedly scary tale of moral decrepitude and the general demise of humanity and the world as we know it.  Most frightening are similarities between Atwood's fictional world and our existence today, for example the "Corps" compounds - gated communities reserved for the rich and corrupt- and the "pleeblands" - the dangerous suburbs where illegal trafficking in women, animals, and drugs, among other things, occurs.  These are just two rather bland examples where comparison only begins.  Don't get me started on the gene splicing, mystery meat, sex-slave trade, environmental degradation for capitalist gain, religious extremism, and political corruption that are hallmarks of Atwood's book.  Definitely worth reading.  Find it in hardcover now at Jennie's. 
Happy holidays.

Robert J Wiersema's Christmas Ghost Story

from Torontoist: Books

part I                    part V
part II                  part VI
part III             part VII
part IV             part VIII
         

       

Originally posted on Robert J Wiersema's blog.

An announcement…

December 16th, 2009

As promised, some news, direct from books.torontoist.com:

The editors of Books@Torontoist are proud to announce the publication of an original story by Robert J Wiersema, bestselling author of the novel Before I Wake (now published in ten countries) and the novella The World More Full of Weeping. The story, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know,” will be serialized on the site in eight daily posts, beginning on Thursday, December 16 and ending on Christmas Eve. The story of a man who makes a mysterious journey to his home town on a stormy Christmas Eve, “Just Like the Ones He Used to Know” revives the Victorian tradition of ringing in the holiday season with a story of the ghostly and the miraculous...

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Walt Whitman "Pioneers! O Pioneers"

"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg