*once a business manager, always a business manager! Another period heavy on the non-fiction, so we’ll start with that. Fire Weather, John Vaillant. Valliant’s previous book, The Tiger, is one of my favorites so I jumped on this one. It’s a vivid and dramatic recounting of the Fort McMurray fire, a science lesson on the […]

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For whatever reason, the first 3 months of 2023 have been the months of reading non-fiction, though a couple of memorable novels did end up on my ereader. NON-FICTION Below the Edge of Darkness, Edith Widder. Another fascinating book about life in the ocean, this one focusing on creatures that inhabit the zone between light […]

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While the Witch Novel is marinating (i.e. I printed off all 299 pages but have not looked at them AT ALL), I’ve turned my attention to my other project, The Glass World Thing. This is the project that started as a fluffy modern romance, switched gears to become a historical fiction supernatural thing (possibly not […]

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This year’s total, give or take, was 126 (not counting some rereads and some physical books for which I can’t use the library’s lending history as a substitute for my lousy memory). Of these, 60% were fiction and 40% non-fiction. My favourites for the year as listed below. FICTION Strong-minded Old (and oldish) Women, mostly […]

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As a break from the WORDS & MUSIC series (because, quite frankly, we haven’t started working on the next video yet!), here are the best things I’ve read since the beginning of 2022. FICTION Matrix, by Lauren Groff. A beautifully written book about the life of a young woman who sent to be the prioress […]

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This was the book for which I had the most difficulty choosing a passage to read.  I had sections that I’d performed successfully before, but they tended to be long, require explanations, and lack any shorter sections that had internal arcs.  This latter is very important in readings, at least for me, because I want […]

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Here’s the second installment in my collaboration with my husband on “words and music”. This passage for COLD HILLSIDE is the most description-heavy of the excerpts I chose for this project.  It’s the first introduction to the fey and I wanted to try to capture their elusive, unreal qualities before the later part of the […]

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I managed a lot of reading over the last three months, some of it frothy, some of it scientific, some of it unexpected. I know, I should have been writing, but c’est la vie. Here are some of the memorable ones. A fine selection of rock memoirs, including LAST CHANCE TEXACO by Rickie Lee Jones […]

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In the absence of anything exciting to write about (yes, I’m writing, no, it’s not going well), here are some of the things I read and enjoyed over the last two months. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. A cursed book (maybe), a haunted school (maybe), three young women trying to get ahead, a movie […]

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Things move slowly these days but here’s an update on the status of the new edition at some key outlets. AMAZON.CA – Available for preorder AMAZON.COM – currently only the original edition is listed CHAPTERS/INDIGO – Available to add to your wishlist. Move info as it becomes available….

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