Is the hair on your toes prickling? Feeling a tad peckish, though you ate only an hour ago? Thinking about having a second breakfast? Or blowing smoke rings? Are you craving tea and a nice seed cake, by the fire? Does the steam rising from your cup seem to take the shape of a dragon […]
Not long ago I had the pleasure of ‘leading’ the North York Central Library Book Club. (I place ‘leading’ in quotation marks because this lively group needed no leading.) For a newcomer to the book club scene, it was an interesting experience in many ways. But what I found most fascinating and perplexing was the […]
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “It’s never too late!” many times. Does it sound as naïve to you as it does to me? If not, sorry to burst your bubble, but sometimes it is too late. The fact is, some dreams and aspirations do have a shelf life. Consider the following occupations: Olympic gymnast, astronaut, […]
Recently I left the city smog behind and headed north, to camp out for a few days. Accustomed to rubbing shoulders with hordes of others in packed subway cars and buses, it was both exhilarating (in the day) and terrifying (at night) to have the forest to ourselves. The campground was strangely underpopulated–the closest […]
Novel reading is one of my favourite things to do. But I have a question for my fellow fiction aficionados: have you ever read a very long novel that you can barely remember? Years ago I tackled Dhalgren, an acclaimed science fiction novel a friend raved about whenever the subject of books came up. I […]
Sometimes it seems that the poets who attract the most attention are those who committed suicide, like Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, or those who embody the cliché of the tortured writer, like the hard drinking Charles Bukowski. So I apologize for the sensationalistic title of my post, but if I’d entitled it, “April is […]
There are those of us who take delight in books which we would hesitate to discuss in some circles, for fear it might call into question our taste, our intelligence, even our mental stability. We might nod and smile while the latest Pulitzer or Giller prize winner is being discussed, while shoving our own book […]
How many toes does an aardvark have? Is anti-matter for real, or is it just something science fiction writers made up? What is a quark? Which movie won’the Academy Award in 1939? Who is the Nobel Peace Prize named after? What is concrete poetry? Where is Timbuktu? Who performed China’s first space walk? What is […]
Do you strain to see what’s on your computer screen? Have trouble reading text, recognizing pictures and graphics, or finding what you are looking for? Screen magnification software called Zoomtext Magnifier enlarges and enhances everything on the computer screen, making your computer easier to see and use. You can select from a range of magnification […]
Here we go again. The latest plagiarism scandal to set tongues wagging in the publishing world involves one Q. R. Markham, pen name for Quentin Rowan. Alert readers picked up on the fact that huge sections of his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets, were stolen from well known authors in the spy novel genre. In […]