Category: Books

There should be a word for books that show up in your life when you need them. Books which obliterate fears or seemingly by magic connect some of the disparate dots of a lifetime. Dots that you maybe didn’t even realize existed, let alone had an awareness that they could use an alignment, call for a needle and thread.

I recently revisited Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a book I first read nearly twenty years ago when I had just moved to a new city for graduate school.

While staying in rural Saskatchewan at the oldest monastery in Canada I read Karen Russell’s latest book The Antidote. So, perhaps it was not a wonder that the first thing that grabbed me about it were its descriptions of the Nebraska prairies.

Carol Off’s At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage (2024), highly recommended, begins with a preamble about Robert MacFarlane’s The Lost Words: A Spell Book.

Yes, a 1,000-page biography may look daunting, but I found myself unable to put down Pessoa by Richard Zenith, which examines the short life of the Portuguese poet, critic, translator and publisher Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).

Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma came out in 2023, a year before Alice Munro devotees had to reckon with the book’s central question: what do we do when an artist’s reprehensible behaviour curdles our appreciation of their work? 

In these distressing political times, goodness has been on my mind. Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the art dealer Lisa Schill, who pleaded guilty to defrauding her clients of six million and a half dollars. "I am the worst kind...because I seem so good. I'm a good person, I'm a good friend, I am loving and generous, I work hard - and I stole your money."