How about a good book?
It's no surprise that David Young, Toronto Reference Library's Playwright-in-Residence, is an avid reader and book lover. As part of TPL's Who's Reading What series, David has offered this list of his recent reads and recommended books.
See our Recommended Reading Page for the full list.
THE GIFT: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde
With dazzling references to anthropology, psychology, economics, art and fairy tales Hyde explores the emotional and spiritual nature of gift giving. Needless to say, the gifts he’s talking about have nothing to do with shopping.
AUSTERLITZ by W.G. Sebald
A deep meditation on time, memory and human experience. A very strange book, perhaps a new literary form – part novel, part memoir, part travelogue – by any measure a literary tour de force.
Also available as an Audiobook on CD
THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje’s most recent novel is surely one of his very best. A twelve-year-old boy boards an ocean liner in Ceylon and journeys across three oceans to meet the man he will become.
HUMAN CHAIN by Seamus Heaney
An essential book of poems. In Heaney’s own words: “When a poem rhymes, when a form regenerates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit.” This is a book of poems without limits.
EMPIRE OF ILLUSION by Chris Hedges
If you want to understand the social and economic machinery underpinning the ‘Occupy Movement’ this extended essay (a Pulitzer Prize winner) is just the ticket. Hedges has taken the torch from Noam Chomsky to become the most important public intellectual writing today about the big issues that really matter.
Also available as an eBook
CHRONICLES by Bob Dylan
You knew he could write a great song. Turns out Dylan can also write a spell-binding memoir of his early years which reads like great fiction.
Also available as an Audiobook on CD, in Large Print, or Talking Book (Restricted to Print Disabled patrons)
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