I’ve got some exciting news! Ive Read This is back on the radio, in fact some of my Alberta readers may have heard me already, the first broadcast of my monthly column aired on Sunday, February 8 at noon (MT) on CKUA Radio. In Calgary, that’s 93.7 for y’all. You can also listen to the…
I’m a couple days late on this one, but I thought I’d weigh in on this latest piece of exciting book news anyway. Harper Lee, author of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird (published in the 1950s), has announced that she will be releasing her second novel titled Go Set a Watchman in July 2015,…
Have you ever attended the reading of a book you hadn’t read yet, and gotten a pre-conceived notion of what it was going to be like before you actually bought it? Or just based on the few pages the author reads to you, you think you already have a good idea of what the story…
Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes is a very dark book. It takes place in dark territories (the crumbling city of Detroit being the main setting), but it also delves into the darkest parts of people’s psyches and souls. It shows the dark side of everything: from the mediocre visual art industry, to the crude jokes…
A woman who is so obsessed with Michael Jackson she roasts her chicken on the ‘clean’ setting of her oven because she’s distracted by listening to his music, a man who wears a t-shirt that says “Thank you for Having Me” at a wedding, a married couple who met at a peace movement but have…
I’ve had this book sitting on my shelf for a few months now, so I apologize this review is so late. It was originally published in India in 2012, and the lovely Calgary-based Freehand Books released it in the fall of 2014. If I had known that the book was so good (and such a…
I’ve always enjoyed stories about ‘regular people, doing regular things’. They hold a certain fascination for me, simply because I can relate to those kinds of characters more than others, my life being pretty uneventful in general. I definitely like a good cozy mystery or thriller every once in a while, but family dramas, introspective…
Well here it is again, my annual list of what i’ve read in the past year. You will notice I read 61 books in 2014: 4 less than I did last year. I shudder to think how little I’m going to read in 2015… For many people, reading 61 books in a year seems like…
Some may already be familiar with this book; it was first published in 1976, and at the time, it was considered very controversial, although it still won the Governor General’s award for fiction that same year. It has been re-released by Penguin/Random House Canada in 2014, and although not as shocking as it was in…
A beautiful, short book about getting trapped in a library; what more could a girl ask for? Books, mystery, illustrations and a small word count-it’s perfect for me! Quite clearly, The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami is right up my alley. The book is gorgeous-as many Murakami fans are aware, only Chip Kidd is allowed to…
Just to be clear, this is NOT a cozy mystery. There is blood and guts in this book, and even a few animal slaughterhouses thrown in for good measure, so don’t pick up Abattoir Blues by Peter Robinson if you are at all squeamish. I don’t feel bad about starting off my review that way,…
Although this book is illustrated, it is in fact meant for adults. Perhaps the expletive in the title makes it obvious enough, but it thought I’d mention it, just in case. You may already be familiar with the similarly named Go the F**k to Sleep book, which as you probably guessed is also meant for…
