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A Golden Guide to Fossils
Fossils: A Fully Illustrated, Authoritative and Easy-to-Use Guide is a compact, classic-style field guide that does exactly what the Golden Guides are known for: it packs a lot of information into a small, highly usable format. This is the sort of book you find in the museum gift shop and is a compact little volume…
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The Glimpses of the Moon
Overview Published in 1922—just a year after Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence—The Glimpses of the Moon stands as one of her most intriguing, if frequently overlooked, social satires. I’m an Edith Wharton fan and it was even unknown to me. Written during a period of post-World…
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Neuromancer
William Gibson’s 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer, stands as the defining cornerstone of the cyberpunk subgenre. Published before the advent of the World Wide Web, the novel offered a radically prescient, neon-drenched vision of a future that reshaped science fiction and popular culture. I first read Neuromancer when I was in high school in the 1980s…
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Wild Dark Shore
Wild Dark Shore is a subantarctic novel, that sounds weird but it is, written by Australian author Charlotte McConaghy. Set on Shearwater Island—a remote, storm-swept isle modeled after Australia’s Macquarie Island, my thoughts went immediately to Tristan da Cunha—the narrative takes place in an ecologically threatened environment home to a critical global seed vault. Rising sea…
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The Whisper on the Night Wind
This was a proper Canadian wilderness adventure tale, with a historical mystery thrown in like extra curds on poutine. The Whisper on the Night Wind by our very own Canadian explorer and author Adam Shoalts investigates a century-old mystery in the remote interior of Labrador. The narrative centers on the historical accounts from the early…
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Dinner Along the Amazon
This was alright. Not great, not terrible, just alright. Dinner Along the Amazon is a compact collection of short stories that shows Findley at his most empathic and I guess, literary. I say that because it feels like he’s trying to be literary, rather than it happening organically. Like if you’ve ever got your suit…
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Winesburg, Ohio
Winesburg, Ohio is a slim, deceptively simple volume full of interlinked short stories that together form an incisive portrait of early 20th century small-town American life. First published in 1919, Sherwood Anderson’s book uses a fragmented, vignette-driven structure. Meaning each one stands alone but when compiled you see how they connect up. The influence on…
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The Penelopiad
Overview Overview Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) is a compact, slyly subversive retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that re-centers the narrative on Penelope and the twelve maidservants who are hanged at the end of the original epic. Written as a faux-memoir from Penelope’s vantage in the Underworld, punctuated by a persistent, shape-shifting chorus made up of…
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That Old Ace in the Hole
Overview That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) is Annie Proulx’s panoramic, character-driven novel set in the Texas–Oklahoma Panhandle. It follows Bob Dollar, a guileless land scout employed by a corporate hog‑farming conglomerate, as he embeds himself in the fictional town of Woolybucket. Proulx makes the landscape and its people the book’s central subjects: the…
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John Willie, The Story of John A.S. Coutts
Overview What a remarkable book. I’ve read several other books by Perez Seves which were excellent, and this was no exception, in fact I feel this was his best work to date. As long-time readers of this blog will know I am very interested in the history of fetish art, and the artist in this…
In His Own Words