by jillemaclean | Nov 30, 2018 | book review, Books Other Than Novels, Novels I’ve Read
Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently? In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction,...
by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | book review, Novels I’ve Read
If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
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 | 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...
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