Depending on from where you are approaching Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, the author has either finely distilled his exhaustive research on the industrial food chain and North America’s often counter-intuitive eating habits into approachable, easily digestible rules to govern food choices—or he has severely dumbed down his message. If you’ve read Pollan’s previous works, The […]
Literary
Posted inArts + Music
Holiday Fiction: Home is where the savoury is
As a little girl, I was convinced my Nan should marry Burl Ives. Never mind her on-again, off-again relationship with Poppy (if you ask her, they are divorced; if you ask him, they’re still married): I believed Burl was the man for her. Every Christmas Eve growing up we’d all pile into the car and […]
Posted inArts + Music
Holiday Fiction: Hill days
Inside this paddock I watch Laura brush down her horse. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the second time I’ve come to see my equine roommate ride. Our landlord went to Florida for Hanukkah and didn’t come back, so we’ve decided to spend rent on Laura’s private riding lessons and a keg. The Bengal Lancers stable […]
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My Wonderful World of Fashion, Nina Chakrabarti (Laurence King)
Tavi Gevinson, the precocious 13-year-old fashion blogger who’s pissing off the established, much-older editors, just scored a column in Harper’s Bazaar. That sounds too much like adult work. Discovering fashion (not the GAP kind) can be, and should be, fun. London artist Nina Chakrabarti, who studied at the Royal College of Art, brings style back […]
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Lovesongs of Emmanuel Taggart, Syr Ruus (Breakwater)
On page one, readers awake with 45-year-old Emmanuel to his feeling of detachment from his own life. His disorientation deepening, Emmanuel takes a wrong turn, ending up in a stranger’s driveway. He’s mistaken as a long-awaited familiar. This sets him off on a personal quest to regain his bearings, meaning and purpose in life. Ruus, […]
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>Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin (Melville House)
I saw a poster once that said “Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t.” Tao Lin’s novella might make you think, “I could write this,” but Lin did, and he managed to write it without poisoning the content with pretentiousness. It’s not a guide for petty thievery, but a scrapbook […]
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The Certainty Dream, Kate Hall (Coach House)
The waking world invades the dreamlands in Kate Hall’s first published collection of poetry. Set seemingly in the middle ground between a lucid dream and concrete reality, the poems follow Hall through a land of whimsy touched with the absolute of entropy, joined by a mynah bird that perches within many of the works, a […]
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The Wanton Troopers, Alden Nowlan (Gooselane)
Get past the overuse of flowery adjectives and moments where the plot skips ahead with no signal to the reader and Nowlan’s posthumously published The Wanton Troopers is a worthwhile read. Released for the first time with the final page of the original manuscript (plus interviews and a readers' guide with an afterword by David […]
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The Honey Locust, Jeffrey Round (Cormorant)
For his second novel, The Honey Locust, Dalhousie grad Jeffrey Round delivers an elegantly written and suspenseful saga of love and war, demonstrating that sometimes the quieter conflicts closer to home are the hardest to overcome. It’s 1995 and photojournalist Angela Thomas has been sent to cover the Bosnian war, an event now recognized as […]
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The Banana Story of Agony, Lesley Johnson (Conundrum)
Not quite a children’s book and not quite a graphic novel, Sackville, NB, artist Lesley Johnson creates strange vignettes illustrated in loose, fluid watercolours. Her themes range from a persistent Santa who a suspicious boy won’t let into the house, to a girl who ignores her family’s warnings that there’s a chicken on her butt, […]
