Books Like Us

In my experience, the cluster of days between one year’s end and another’s beginning are ripe with reflection. I can’t stop myself from cataloguing losses, gains, and lessons learned before drafting a new chapter. I wonder if this is common for others who also read as many coming of age novels as I did during... Read More

Dystopian YA fiction brings readers into settings that feel simultaneously distant and close. The adolescent characters in this genre fight for their lives and the lives of their loved ones under authoritarian systems, violent oppressors, and villains intent on destruction. These thematic threads of survival and persistence appeal to readers of all ages, particularly when... Read More

When the temperature and timing are right, some reading experiences can feel like fever dreams; narrative immersions that keep you up late into the night and transport you across oceans and decades. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels – My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of  a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay... Read More

Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of self-harm, violence, abuse, and suicide. As a reader who occasionally enjoys judging books by their covers, I remember the curiosity I felt looking at Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) for the first time. Our 35th reader was also transfixed by the cover subject’s expression of both pleasure... Read More

“People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?” For over a century, the red-haired heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne (“with an e”) Shirley, has stolen the hearts of readers across Canada... Read More

What kind of spring is this, / Where there are no flowers and / The air is filled with a miserable smell? – Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost The above poem was etched into a styrofoam cup and passed between detainees in the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention camp. It is included alongside twenty-one other poems in... Read More

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we often judge books by their cover. In the case of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), soothing blues and turquoises promise levity and peacefulness, both desirable states of being in a frantically disordered world. The KonMari method... Read More

If you ask a PhD candidate studying English literature to name a book that had a profound impact on her life, chances are you’ll receive an impressive list as a response. Our thirty-first reader’s selections included Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, everything written by Carson McCullers, and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine.... Read More

Who am I? Why I am here? Why did it take me so long to get this thirtieth episode up and running? What is the self? What is human consciousness? Are we a perpetually perplexed species? In this episode we dive headfirst into questions of human existence and consciousness with a return guest and the... Read More

Content Warning: Please be advised that this episode features discussions of sexual assault, rape culture, victim blaming, and uses language that some may find triggering. Now is the time for difficult conversations. We need to listen to voices that have long been silenced and challenge those who promote fear among vulnerable populations. This is particularly... Read More

When summer finally arrives in Canada, people walk around cities and towns in a daze. It’s as if we’ve all woken up on another planet and are trying to remember long-forgotten survival skills. Once the shock wears off, people flood onto patios and into parks to pay homage to the sun and to melt the... Read More

I have always been an avid reader. As a child I devoured pretty much any book I could get my sticky little hands on, showing very little discretion regarding genre or subject. That lack of preference faded the day I encountered the work of Roald Dahl. To say I was obsessed with Dahl would be an... Read More

Grab your best walking stick, find a supply of lembas bread, brush up on your Elvish dialects, and join me on a journey through Middle-earth with our twenty-sixth reader. After decades of composition and revision, The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) between July... Read More

Six readers. Six major novels. Six insightful conversations. This is the second installment in a two-part series on Jane Austen and her work. Austen has played a formative role in my personal reading history since the day I selected Pride and Prejudice for a sixth grade book report. I’ve often relied upon Austen’s novels for... Read More

Six readers. Six major novels. Six insightful conversations. This is the first installment in a two-part series on Jane Austen and her work. Austen has played a formative role in my personal reading history since the day I selected Pride and Prejudice for a sixth grade book report. I’ve often relied upon Austen’s novels for... Read More

I think it’s fair to assume that at some point many of you have sipped a glass of wine, nodded your head solemnly, and murmured: “Mmm. Yes, that’s good.” Whether you’re under the watchful eye of an eager waiter or in hearing distance of someone you want to impress, the appearance of connoisseurship in this... Read More

Our twenty-second reader and I sat down next to a tall shelf bursting with children’s books to discuss her connection to E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952). In the sixty four years since its publication, this masterful tale of unlikely friendship has captured the hearts and imaginations of generations of children around the world. White’s simple... Read More

Ah, Victorian fiction; lengthy narratives, plots that may involve the return of at least one character from the dead, and the frequent determination of a woman’s character based on her gaze/finger slenderness. I admire Victorian authors for their commitment to realism and their vital reflections upon the complexity of human nature amid sociocultural change. When... Read More

I met our twentieth reader on a bright morning after a heavy snowfall. We cleared off a bench overlooking some subway tracks, buttoned up our coats a little tighter, and began a conversation about Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). Paton’s eloquent advocacy for racial equality and his depiction of the devastating consequences of... Read More

Jean Cocteau was a true Jacques-of-all-trades. Throughout his life and career he garnered both critical and popular acclaim as a filmmaker, playwright, designer, author, and poet. His inner circle of friends and collaborators included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Eric Satie, and Marlene Dietrich. Cocteau penned Les Enfants Terribles (1929) during a week of... Read More

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) often catches readers off guard. Centuries of stage and screen adaptations have resulted in a game of interpretative broken telephone that distances us from the original narrative’s poignant reflections on human nature. Our eighteenth reader studied the novel as a high school student and as an undergraduate. We sat down to... Read More

In this seventeenth episode I make a new friend, we grab some beer, and sit down to discuss Jared Diamond’s deconstruction of 13,000 years of human history, the spread of colonialism, and racial exceptionalism in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997). This ambitious work of non-fiction quickly became an international bestseller... Read More

I met our sixteenth reader on a rare and well-deserved break from her postgraduate studies in law. It was clear from the beginning of our conversation that she was intent on building a strong case in defense of the oft slandered genre of young adult fiction. Her initiation into YA is attributed to late-night readings... Read More

Join me in some word association: Romance novels. Cheesy? Trashy? Embarrassing? Redundant? In this episode listeners are encouraged to keep an open mind about this immensely popular and often disrespected genre. Our fifteenth reader begins the conversation by identifying Lisa Kleypas’ Devil in Winter (2006) as the novel that initiated her interest in romance fiction.... Read More

This fourteenth episode features an in-depth conversation about Siri Hunstvedt’s expansive and confrontational novel The Blazing World (2014). I sat down with our reader to discuss Hustvedt’s tragic heroine, Harriet Burden, and her strategic exposure of gender inequality within the art world. The novel is provocative, insightful, and draws the reader toward an understanding of... Read More

Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes (1996) presents a startling account of the author’s impoverished childhood in depression-era New York City and Limerick, Ireland. The most remarkable aspect of this narrative is the endurance of McCourt’s sense of humour throughout years of starvation, disease, and horrendous living conditions. Our reader spoke to me via... Read More

On a rainy afternoon our twelfth reader and I took a stroll around a neighbourhood readying itself for Halloween and spoke about Mary Poppins (1934), the first installment in P.L. Travers’ immensely popular series. Our reader fell in love with the story as a child and had plenty to say about its impact on her... Read More

Our tenth reader and I sat down on a park bench in the shadow of a private all-boys school to discuss Pamela Zoline’s subversive sci-fi story “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967). It’s an amazing work of short fiction that deftly portrays a housewife’s nervous breakdown alongside a discussion of physics and cosmology. We... Read More

I met our ninth reader on a gloomy October evening for a delicious bowl of ramen and a conversation about the short story collection Oddly Enough (1994). Bruce Coville’s fantastical and often spooky narratives enthralled our reader at a young age and strengthened her interest in fiction. We talked about the humour found in the... Read More

Our eighth reader selected the 1952 sci-fi novel City by Clifford D. Simak. The novel’s unusual narrative is guided by philosophizing dogs from the distant future who are in the process of reciting the oral history of humankind. The novel suggests the inherent violence of human nature and challenges the endurance of our species. After... Read More

It’s easy to become nostalgic about the years before the Harry Potter series was adapted to film, before the theme parks were created, or before the associated merchandise generated more excitement than pages of text. In my memory the books were always enough. Each novel provided access to a magical world within our own where... Read More

I met up with our sixth reader after her return home from work as a community librarian in the Markham Public Library system. (A truly dedicated book lover never shies away from a conversation about literature even if they spend each day embedded in stacks of books.) After an introduction to her cat and a... Read More

Our fifth reader is my grandfather. He has been an avid science fiction reader since high school and has held a subscription to Analog: Science Fiction and Fact since 1970. Countless copies of the magazine reside upon bowed shelves in his basement, and I am regularly asked if I have any leads on a loving adoptive... Read More

I met with our fourth reader in a crowded cafe (pardon the occasional hiss of the espresso machine) to discuss the novel Veronika Decides to Die (1998) by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho. Our reader, a recent recipient of a Master’s in Social Work, discovered the novel during a self-guided study of fiction featuring narratives of... Read More

Our third reader selected Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). She studied Morrison’s account of slavery, profound loss, and a haunting as a high school student, an undergraduate, and as a postgraduate. Each re-reading uncovered new meaning and fresh details in familiar sentences. Morrison’s poetic style and skilled presentation of alternative narratives define Beloved as... Read More

Our second reader selected the novel A Complicated Kindness (2004) by celebrated Canadian author Miriam Toews. We spoke about teenage reading, the author’s deft treatment of emotional trauma, and the profound empathy found in reading the right book at the right time. Our reader (a very talented writer) also emphasized the importance of reading in... Read More

Ah, the profound satisfaction of picking up the right book at the right time. The subject of this first post is the novel A Bird in the House (1970) by beloved Canadian author Margaret Laurence. This series of short stories chronicles a writer’s recollection of her childhood in the small fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba.... Read More