“The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.”— Chuck Palahniuk Everyone’s favourite American nihilist novelist (he wrote Fight Club, natch) popped out this observation into a 2007 book called Rant,… Read More
“We were tired of making coffee and not policy.” — Robin Morgan The feminist writer, editor and author Robin Morgan died in New York Saturday, just days after her colleague and fellow activist Gloria Steinem…. Read More
“Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet. Peace, at last.” — Tony Kushner The playwright Tony Kushner put these words near the end of his epic Angels in America, in the mouth… Read More
“I’ve always been misunderstood because of how I look; don’t judge me by the cover ’cause I’m a real good book.” — Dolly Parton In November 2023, I borrowed the audiobook of Songteller: My Life… Read More
I spent some lovely time this month with Bill Bryson’s wonderful One Summer: America, 1927. Bryson finished the book 13 years ago, and I read it just a year before the centennial of the period… Read More
“Hope is a gift. You can’t choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.”— Ann-Marie MacDonald Fall on Your Knees, the novel from which today’s… Read More
Some nights ago, when there was still a bit of heat in the air and golden light outside, Martha and I sat down to watch A Room with a View. I’d hesitate to count the… Read More
Like a lot of people, I didn’t think that much of George Michael at the outset. Wham! was a huge pop act in the early and mid-Eighties, and were hard to escape. Nothing really against… Read More
“Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.”— Joyce Carol Oates Having turned 88 last month, the American author Joyce… Read More
For many years, I’ve delighted in telling people about a library in St. John’s that most folks have never seen — nor even heard of. I’ve written an article for the summer issue of NQ,… Read More
“We have things that grow outside of the house but I wouldn’t really call it a garden.”— Roz Chast A prime attraction of The New Yorker for almost five decades, the cartoonist Roz Chast draws… Read More
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”— Flannery O’Connor You won’t find photos of the American author Flannery O’Connor as an old woman, nor even really of a middle-aged… Read More
I love libraries. I wish the libraries in St. John’s were like cathedrals, that there were more of them, that they were better located and that they had better resources for public use and service…. Read More
“I began to understand that self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”— Gloria Steinem Self-esteem has been on my mind a bit lately, for a variety of reasons. One thing that has… Read More
“I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality.”— Mordecai Richler The phrase “voracious reader” can be a loaded one, often without meaning to be…. Read More