Passage Through the Week #1
Welcome to a new weekly feature. With “Passage Through the Week” KIRBCers will help you pass the Wednesday slump with their favourite literary passages (and I use “passages” to avoid a battle between...
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“Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people,...
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“All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back...
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I promise, real reviews aplenty are coming soon. But in the meantime, just one of the many passages I have underlined in this incredible gem of a book: “Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up...
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Again, my apologies for being a bit behind in my actual book blogging. I have a review of Coupland’s The Gum Thief under construction (in my brain), and am currently working my way through Austin...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #6
Bad, bad blogger, I know. No real reviews and my Google Reader is posting some frightening TBR numbers. I hope to remedy that ASAP, but in the interim I plead moving. Yet out of the ugly, chaotic thing...
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As I write this, I’m looking out at my new living room which is still in utter shambles. It is really in a rather shocking disarray, but one thing is set up and looking pretty good already — my...
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I’ve started taking Vitamin D breaks from the workday at the office, and in celebration of sunshine and summer being just around the corner, this wonderful passage: “Often they swam and as Amory...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #9
We haven’t selected any poetry so far, so with summer arriving, I thought I’d quote a poem I love to read (parts of ) lying on the grass in the summer. Here’s the very end of “Song of Myself,” which is...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #10
For a week that’s speeding by, a concise little gem from my favourite Canadian author: “There are some stories you can never hear enough. They are the same every time you hear them — but you are not....
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #11
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight...
View ArticlePassage through the Week #13
When in doubt, go back to Woolf… “Is it not possible – I often wonder – that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? . . ....
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #14
Having double-majored in English and History, I’m a sucker for writing about where the two intersect. That is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #15
This week I posted about Nicole Krauss’s remarkable The History of Love, and there were too many beautiful passages to put in the review, but I couldn’t resist sharing them. Here’s a little bit of...
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One of my favourite opening paragraphs (from one of my favourite books). It’s got it all — humour, foreshadowing, history, and a wonderful inversion of the fairy tale opening while maintaining many of...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #17
This week, not a passage from a book, but from Anne Enright’s eloquent and elegant Globe and Mail review of Alice Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness: Most importantly, these stories are not...
View ArticlePassage Through the Week #18
Wish I’d said it myself: Lisa Moore’s astute argument for character driven novels (From Saturday’s Globe) : Character is plot, because character moves, leaves traces, is formed and reformed and doesn’t...
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