In My Mind’s Eye (Liveright) is Jan Morris’s 4-somethingth book (she is not quite sure). Subtitled “A Thought Diary,” it’s a delight, something more than a trifle, less than a full meal. “I have never before in my life kept a diary of my thoughts,” she writes on Day 1, “and here at the start of my tenth decade, having for a moment nothing much else to write, I am having a go at it.” Most of the entries are short, about a page, and riff on some of the themes that you might expect from a woman entering her tenth decade: love, politics, friends, the indignities of age, plus an ongoing upset that animals are kept in zoos. Sometimes she seems deliberately trite; other times disarmingly frank. The real purpose for this review is that there’s a reason for Geisters to take note of In My Mind’s Eye. Back in 1992 Morris published O Canada: Travels in an Unknown Country, a collection of ten essays about ten Canadian cities, from St. John’s to Vancouver. It might not be counted among her finest work, but she does know a thing or two about our country. Her famous “Smile Test,” tested back then on the people of Vancouver, is referenced again in this volume, on Day 11. I’ve always liked the premise, which finds the author “smiling resolutely at strangers… met in the street and analyzing their responses.” Vancouver she judged as inhibited. But Saskatoon! On Day 97 of this diary, reading in the bathtub, she revisits her account of the city. While apologizing for “effrontery” of rendering judgment on cities around the world, barging “uninvited and ignorant” into each, she notes that “even Saskatooners must admit that I got something right—I liked the place! A genuinely characterful city, I called it.” And, she concludes, “they should see what I wrote about Sydney…”