by jillemaclean | Sep 15, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
A friend gave me a copy of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio several months ago because it’s set in Provence, which I’m visiting this year, and it’s partly about the plague of the mid-1300s, a century that has me hooked. I took over a week to read it. In it, the...
by jillemaclean | Jul 1, 2018 | Book Review
Can art be transformative? At Central Library in Halifax the week of Shakespeare’s birthday (after I’d written the previous Book Talk post on Hamlet), there was a display near the front door of books related to the bard. I picked up Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power...
by jillemaclean | Jun 17, 2018 | Book Review, Books Other Than Novels
When the HD version of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch came to Halifax, I read the play first (no, I’d never read it, and yes, I’m admitting this on a public forum), then off I went to the movie theatre (this was pre-Covid). But before I went, obeying one of...
by jillemaclean | May 31, 2018 | The Writing Process, Writing Inspiration
How do you counterbalance too much time spent at the computer? I vowed I’d never write a blog at the very last minute, and here I am – with three blogs stashed in Microsoft Word – writing one I want to post tomorrow. I’ve started researching a sequel for the as-yet...
by jillemaclean | May 15, 2018 | Book Review
Do you read book reviews before you read the book or afterwards? I opt for “afterwards.” I want to read the novel, think about it, then check out the reviews to see if I agree with them or if I’ve missed something crucial. I read Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny...
by jillemaclean | Apr 30, 2018 | Book Review, Novels I’ve Read
Richard Wagamese was an Ojibway writer from northern Ontario, from the Wabaseemoong First Nation, who died in 2017. I read his novel “Indian Horse” over several days. Not a book to be rushed, because of the beauty of its prose and its harrowing story. The first few...
by jillemaclean | Apr 16, 2018 | Novels I’ve Read, Writing Inspiration
Does a book you’ve owned for a while suddenly leap off the shelf and demand to be read? Helen Humphrey’s The Lost Garden, published in 2002, was such a book for me last week. I read it over an evening and the next morning. In prose both subtle and sure of itself, she...
by jillemaclean | Mar 30, 2018 | Book Review, Writing Inspiration
Although I don’t have a reading list per se, I have one shelf of books that I really want to get to. Bookends on the coffee table hold seven or eight novels that are a little higher priority, and there are at least four more books – fiction and non-fiction – on the...
by jillemaclean | Mar 13, 2018 | The Writing Process
Years ago, I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and remember throwing the book against the wall because I’d been deeply invested in it and was infuriated by the ending, by the feeling that I’d been played for a fool. The details of the ending? Gone. The only other book I...
by jillemaclean | Mar 2, 2018 | History of Books
I love books. For what they say and how they say it, of course, and also for their physicality, their heft, their smell (surely others than myself smell a book before they buy it?), for the font and the all-important cover. I’ve even been told that overloaded...
