Oblique Litanies by Paul Davies (ECW Press) is a collection of short personal essays—the author calls them "conversations," but "monologues" would be more accurate: they are really half-conversations, the other halves of which are understood to belong to the reader. Books like this are rare, and we should have more of them; there is something quite satisfyingly voyeuristic in the reading of them. Davies is a tangential conversationalist, and these pieces have many angles in them.