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Patty Osborne
The First Quarter of the Moon

At press time I am in the middle of The First Quarter of the Moon (TalonBooks) by Michel Tremblay (translated by Sheila Fischman), and so far have been completely drawn in by the complicated and contradictory relationship between two young boys—the f

Patty Osborne
The Gathering Tree

The Gathering Tree by Larry Loyie (Theytus Books) was initiated by Chee Mamuk, an organization that provides aboriginal communities with culturally appropriate education about HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, and there is a long li

Sewid-Smith Daisy
The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the latest book by Yann Martel (Vintage), looked to me like a novel, not a book of short stories (which it is). So, when coming close to the end of the first “chapter,” I was alarmed at how fast the story se

Kris Rothstein
The French Guy

No secret Canadian knowledge will help illuminate The French Guy, the latest film by Ann Marie Fleming. Though it is obviously shot in Vancouver, this absurd story lacks a sense of place, and the central joke about the eponymous French guy falls flat

Michael Hayward
The Forger

As an avid long-distance cyclist who also loves to be pulled into a good adventure story, I could not resist Cioma Schönhaus’s book The Forger (Granta), a memoir that describes how Schönhaus lived in hiding in wartime Berlin while working clandestine

Patty Osborne
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Here in Vancouver we had Honest Nat’s Department Store at 48th and Fraser, and in Karen X. Tulchinsky’s book The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, Toronto had Lenny’s House of Bargains on College Street near Spadina, which, according to Tulchinsky’s stor

Michael Hayward
The Facts of Winter

Canadian readers may doubt that they can learn anything new about winter from The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s), a book that is faux in many ways. The afterword is a faux biography by Paul La Farge, an American “translator,” of the book’s purported a

Geist Staff
The Ghost in the Gears

Howard White is known to his readers as a wry chronicler of life in the bush and on the boats. But his new book of poems, The Ghost in the Gears (Harbour), reveals the heart of a true romantic beating beneath that lumpen exterior.

Patty Osborne
The Garden Letters

Some of the books that come in over the transom I scoop up for other members of my family. But somewhere between the office and home I often find myself sneaking a read. I took home The Garden Letters by Elspeth Bradbury and Judy Maddocks (Polestar)

Geist Staff
The French Quarter

In his new book, The French Quarter (Macfarlane, Walter & Ross), Ron Graham sets out to illuminate French-English relations in Canada by exploring the French-Canadian side of his own family. Sounds promising, and sets us up brilliantly with a descrip

Geist Staff
The Girl with the Botticelli Face

The dust jacket of The Girl with the Botticelli Face (W. D. Valgardson, Douglas & McIntyre) promises an "explicit rendering of sexual politics," a dissection of "the nature of male rage" and even "one of the most hilarious scenes in CanLit." This rev

BILLEH NICKERSON
The Gladys Elegies

Barbara Nickel's The Gladys Elegies (Coteau Books) was the deserving winner of this year's Pat Lowther Memorial Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Although there are many things I'd rather do than read sonnets, Nickel's subtle and del

Lily Gontard
The Goldfish Dancer

Patricia Robertson is not a prolific writer—The Goldfish Dancer (Biblioasis) is only her second collection in over a decade—but in this collection she offers stories that draw you in and make you forget about time: a rare gift.

Patty Osborne
The Harp

At the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival I watched The Harp, a short film that is written and produced by John Bolton, who used to share a music stand with my daughter in the local youth orchestra. John gave up playing the viola years ago, b

Patty Osborne
The Glace Bay Miners' Museum

Another story about love between two misfits, The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books) by Sheldon Currie, should have been called Margaret's Museum, like the highly praised movie that came out of it. If it hadn't been for our astute Geist intern,

Sarah Maitland
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Sarah Maitland reviews The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Random House).

Geist Staff
The Girl Wants To

The Girl Wants To, edited by Lynn Crosbie (Coach House) overwhelms its readers with sheer volume. It contains everything from cartoons to photos, to articles and stories and poems, to exhibit documentation.

Michael Hayward
The Hasheesh Eater

Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (Rutgers) was first published in 1857, and is now reprinted as another in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives series. Described as “the first full-length example of American drug literature,” this account is closely mode

Kris Rothstein
The Glenwood Treasure

Until I found The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu (Dundurn), I thought writers of adult books were ignoring one of the tried-and-true plots of children’s books: the joys and pitfalls of searching for treasure. Blithe is the quiet daughter of swank

Kris Rothstein
The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle

Monique Proulx’s long-awaited novel, The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle (Douglas & McIntyre), is the story of Florence, a web designer leading a safe virtual life. When she finds out that her father’s dying words feature prominently in a book being w

Luanne Armstrong
The Inner Green

Most of the interesting books to be found on the subject of home and place, where we live and how we relate to it, are American, but The Inner Green (Maa Press), is a collection of natural history and personal essays by K. Linda Kivi and Eileen Deleh

Michael Hayward
The Goshawk

One reality of modern publishing is that this season’s new books are next season’s remainders. This harsh fact is compounded by the inexorable disappearance of good used bookstores everywhere, with the result that many excellent books that have had t

GILLIAN JEROME
The Hip Mama Survival Guide

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Patty Osborne
The Key of Do

In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Blaine Kyllo
Reservoir Dogs

The most comprehensive DVD (and the most fun) to hit my machine lately is the special edition release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. There are so many reasons to have this DVD in your library I hardly know where to start.

Patty Osborne
Restricted Entry

I got a copy of Restricted Entry, by Janine Fuller and Stuart Blackley (Press Gang) as part of the ticket price for a benefit for Little Sister's Bookstore & Art Emporium. For those two of you who don't already know, Little Sister's has taken the gov

Shannon Emmerson
Restlessness

Aritha van Herk’s Restlessness (Red Deer College Press), though, ought to go missing from hostel shelves. It is a meditative novel which begins on a dramatic and Gothic note with a woman in a Calgary hotel room waiting for her “chosen assassin.”

Patty Osborne
River Queen: The Amazing Story of Tugboat Titan Lucille Johnstone

Eventually Lucille Johnstone told her story to Paul E. Levy, who made it into a book, River Queen: The Amazing Story of Tugboat Titan Lucille Johnstone (Harbour), an absorbing read even for people who think they’re not interested in reading about bus

Daniel Francis
Risotto

My daughter fulfilled my request for a new cookbook. Since seeing the movie Big Night I have wanted to be able to make risotto. Now, with the help of Risotto (Macmillan) by Judith Barrett and Norma Wasserman, I can.

Geist Staff
Riffs

Readers of Dennis Lee's Riffs (Brick) might find themselves disappointed with this book, which declares itself to be fiction when they would perhaps prefer it to be fact. As fiction, these poems don't read well: they are clever, well-crafted, technic

Stephen Osborne
River of Shadows

Solnit’s book River of Shadows (Viking Penguin) is a brilliant account of Muybridge’s life and the “Age of the Technological Wild West”: Muybridge was a great inventor and tinkerer, one of the most original of the landscape photographers (his panoram

Michael Hayward
Road Novels, 1957–1960

Road Novels, 1957—1960 is an omnibus volume dressed in the standard Library of America livery: a burgundy cloth binding; a black dust jacket discreetly trimmed in red, white and blue; a bound-in ribbon marker.

Michael Hayward
Robinson Crusoe on Mars

The first time I saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, Criterion dvd) was in the Cedar V Theatre, a Quonset-style, single-screen movie house on Lynn Valley Road in North Vancouver: 25 cents for a science-fiction double bill in 1965.

Patty Osborne
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac

Michael Hayward
Rogue Male

Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male—an old favourite of mine—follows a British sportsman as he returns from an unnamed central European country (read Germany), having failed in his attempt to assassinate the dictator who is that country’s head

Blaine Kyllo
Room Behavior

Rob Kovitz's Room Behavior (Treyf/Insomniac) is an interesting attempt by a Manitoba architect to document the impact that a room has on its inhabitants. Kovitz juxtaposes text and image, inviting us to look at the rooms we live in, the spaces we oc

S. K. Page
Rocket Science

Rocket Science by Julia Gaunce (Pedlar Press) is a wonderful first novel that should get great notices. Here is a true enactment of a certain Canadian life: Mr. Wicker is the caretaker of the apartment building; Mrs. Wicker attends leather-craft clas

Patty Osborne
Room of One's Own Journal

The December 1994 issue of Room of One's Own, subtitled "Geography of Gender," features the winners of its first annual literary competition, along with nine other finalists. The writing here is very good, the cover is inviting, and they've reviewed

Lily Gontard
Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars

Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle

Mandelbrot
Sacred Places in North America: A Journey into the Medicine Wheel

Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of

Stephen Osborne
Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se

Lara Jenny
Salt: A World History

Thanks to an educational record I had as a kid, I’ve always known that salt was once traded for gold. What I didn’t know about salt, though, is a heck of a lot, and it’s all covered in Mark Kurlansky’s 400-plus-page book Salt: A World History (Knopf

Alana Mairs
Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory

Near the beginning of his book, Ricou states that his intention in writing about this ubiquitous plant was to answer the question: “Could a regional culture be found by focusing on a single, native, uncharismatic species?” More simply, he wanted to f

Patty Osborne
Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights

When the Bosnian peace agreement was announced in Dayton, Ohio, I wanted to ask Elma Softic what she thought of it all. I had just finished reading her book Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Key Porter: translation by Nada Conic), and I wanted her to c

Leah Rae
Sartre for Beginners

What I remember most vividly from Existentialism 101 was nausea—not Sartre’s famous novel, but a classmate of mine who spontaneously vomited during a discussion of Nietzsche.

Kris Rothstein
Screaming at a Wall

Drugs and disillusionment also figure in Greg Everett’s memoir Screaming at a Wall (Grundle Ink), featuring a main character named Greg and events and dialogue that are too convincing to be made up. The charm of this book is its unflinching portrayal

Stephen Osborne
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

Stephen R. Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Thomas Allen) is an excellent account of life and lingering death on the high seas during the age of empires and oceanic voyag

Lara Jenny
School Shmool

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Amy Francis
Bullets Over Broadway

The close proximity of my new apartment to a repertory cinema has caused me to go through a movie-going renaissance. Unfortunately, most of my discoveries have been in the mediocre to bad category.

Eve Corbel
Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures

After dinner I retired with my newly acquired copy of a twenty-six-year old book, Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), essays by Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Ar

Adam Lewis Schroeder
By a Frozen River

Tight, pithy, replete with thinly veiled autobiographical details of a childhood in Quebec and an adult life spent as an ex-pat writer in, of all places, Cornwall, the stories were short enough that I could read two or three on a twenty-minute bus ri

Mindy Abramowitz
Bust

Bust magazine is dedicated to giving voice to the generation of women caught between Cosmo and Sassy. It is also font-crazy and printed on smudgy newsprint.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Caesarea

Caesarea (ECW Press) by Tony Burgess. There's no better place to spend New Year's Eve than Caesarea, a small town on the shore of menacing Lake Scugog, a place to forget your troubles, relax, do a little fishing, settle into your lawn chair on the ou

Leah Rae
Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase

According to Hollywood legend, it was Harry Houdini who gave Buster Keaton the name “Buster” after watching the young Keaton tumble down a flight of stairs. This myth is debunked in Marion Meade’s biography Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (Da Capo P

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Michael Hayward
Campo Santo

When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him “the most interesting and ambitious writ

Barry Kirsh
Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby?

The storyteller's verve in Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby? (McClelland & Stewart), by the Montreal writer Elyse Gasco, speaks volumes in which time and place hardly matter. Gasco writes in the second person in four of the seven short stories; in one of th

Jon Burrows
Canada's Gigantic

Another oddly-shaped book protruding from the shelf at the library the other day was Canada's Gigantic (Summerhill), a collection of photographs by Henri Robideau, a Gianthropologist photographer who searches out Giant Things in the Canadian landscap

Sarah Pollard
Canada in the Fifties

As the century turns, generational retrospectives are cropping up everywhere—a look back requires only file footage, the cut and paste. Recent books documenting Canadian life in the 1950s include Canada in the Fifties (Viking), selections from the ar

Stephen Osborne
Canada's Boreal Forest

The boreal forest is the mysterious place most of us are aware of only to the extent that we know we don’t want to get lost in it: the deep unconscious of a nation (Champlain called it the land God gave to Cain).

Patty Osborne
Canada in the Rough

The show, called Canada in the Rough, is sponsored by companies that sell firearms, ammunition, trucks, outdoor gear and crossbows, and it includes a Rough Cooking segment (caribou stew with prunes and dried apricots served over couscous) and a Rough

Geist Staff
Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films

Michael Posner's Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films (D&M) is a passionate and at times hair-raising account of what's right and what's wrong with Canadian moviemaking. Posner follows the making and marketing of ten very di

Stephen Osborne
Canadian Literary Power

Somewhat more put-downable is Canadian Literary Power by Frank Davey (NeWest Press), which took me a week to read. This is a book filled with Serious Thinking, so of course it's slow, and I'm still not sure how much of it I can agree with.

Daniel Francis
Canada’s House: Rideau Hall and the Invention of a Canadian Home

On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the

Geist Staff
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology

There is something unexplained about Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology (Oxford). This book is a collection of lengthy extracts from the written accounts of two dozen well-known explorers, starting with Pierre Radisson

Geist Staff
Canadian Notes and Queries

Curmudgeons of a more bibliophiliac bent should be subscribing to Canadian Notes and Queries, a fascinating magazine of little-known facts of interest that Doug Fetherling took over a few years ago with the intention of broadening its range and its r

Sam Macklin
Captain Beefheart: The Biography

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

S. K. Page
Cape Breton Road

The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit

Barbara Stewart
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Michael Hayward
Celine and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

Kris Rothstein
Cat Book

I thought Cat Book by Emily Eve Weinstein (Beau Soleil) would be a collection of too cute stories about people and their cats, but I soon learned not to be fooled by the easy beauty of Weinstein’s cat paintings, which dot the pages, or by the text it

Stephen Osborne
Cartouches

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Alana Mairs
Certifiable

The cover blurb on Certifiable, a collection of short stories by David McGimpsey (Insomniac), describes it as “funny and twisted stories of American culture.” Topics range from the biological makeup of the McDonald’s character Grimace to fragmented l