Happy New Year! Time to take down the old calendar and put up the new. If you're one of those who love the feeling of accomplishment that comes with peeling back the leaves of a page-a-day calendar, or the comfort of reading the daily entries in a book of meditations, you will love Patti Smith's new offering.
Estates Large and Small will break your heart in the best possible way. Smart, sad, and witty, it’s a rumination on what makes us human and what makes a life worth living. And it is a warm love letter to Toronto and to bookselling.
Fall is the perfect season for a road trip, and for stocking up on books for the cold months from your favorite local indie. I took to the road a few weeks ago for a whirlwind Great Lakes independent bookstore tour that took me from Detroit to Toronto to Buffalo and places between. I visited 10 stores in 6 cities in 4 days. Whew! So many great shops, each with its unique flavor. Here’s my travelogue:
Reading Leonora Carrington’s books is akin to walking through a gallery of her paintings - strange, unsettling, surreal, and baffling, yet with a wild, color-saturated beauty.
“The book was better.” We hear this axiom every day at the store, with the plethora of books being adapted into films and series. I can’t begin to understand the challenges of taking several hundred pages of text and realizing it on the screen. What to retain? What to leave out? How much can you change without betraying the author’s intent or making those who have read the book howl in protest?
This month, I’ll be judging books by their covers. It may or may not come as a surprise, but as booksellers, we do this all the time. We often find that a pretty face does not always signify a vacuous read; often it’s quite the opposite. Each of the books below hits the sweet spot of gorgeous cover art with great writing behind it.
Happy (?) Pride Month!
I don't usually focus on a single author in these monthly posts, but our book club recently discussed Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and it got me thinking about other books by this amazing author that I have loved over the years. Read on -
April is Earth Month and Poetry Month, and what better time to revisit the work of nature writer and poet Gary Snyder, specifically his 1990 essay collection The Practice of the Wild. While there have been countless books dealing with nature and the climate crisis in recent years (a few of which are recommended below) it is edifying to reread Snyder’s compassionate, philosophical, mythopoetic take on the interaction of humans with nature.
