The gap between what I’ve read and what I’ve written about here grows alarmingly wider, even as my chance of lessening it becomes very slim with the return of classes, the numerous obligations of teaching.…
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Many of you who took a 1st-year English course — called something like Composition & Rhetoric or Writing for University — will perhaps remember working your way through an anthology of essays — to which…
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I thought that Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That might make a hat-trick, withthese other two titles, of books I couldn’t finish. The rants of one particular character — against office and government bureaucracies, against taxes,…
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Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, has been widely acclaimed. Charles Foran’s review in the Globe and Mail convinced me to read it, and I must agree with much of…
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For too many hours of this past road trip, I thought I should keep Pater company while it wasn’t my turn to drive. For some of that time, I read to him from a lovely…
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