Keep Toronto Reading February 1-28, 2007

If you live in or near Toronto, February is Keep Toronto Reading Month. This literary undertaking is being sponsored by the Toronto Public Library. You can check out all of the different events being run throughout the month that have been designed to help promote and encourage reading, at their nifty website: Keep Toronto Reading.
I am all for anything that promotes books, reading, writing and literacy, so check it out and see if there is something of interest to you.
Cheers!

Notes on the Sidebar Links

Hello!
I have started to post the books I have read on a sidebar. You will notice that I have linked the books to amazon.ca, so now I "got some 'splainin' to do". First, I am a huge supporter of local, independent booksellers and in fact, the book group I belong to meets every month at our local independent. Please don't get the impression that I am encouraging you to shop at Amazon. I just find that the web site offers a great format as far as being thorough in the book descriptions and helpful by having readers offer their opinions too. Whenever I am looking for new book suggestions, or want to know more about a book before I buy it, I always check out Amazon. Does that make me a bad person?? If anything, I encourage you to help keep our small, independent booksellers in business. Throw the little dog a bone people! Okay, so ends the lesson (and I'll get off my soapbox now).
Cheers!

Hmm..What's Your Personality Type?

This is an interesting and quick assessment of your personality. I think that it is quite accurate. Give it a try!

You Are an ISJF

You Are An ISFJ

The Nurturer You have a strong need to belong, and you are very loyal. A good listener, you excel at helping others in practical ways.In your spare time, you enjoy engaging your senses through art, cooking, and music.You find it easy to be devoted to one person, who you do special things for. You would make a good artist, writer, interior designer, chef, or child psychologist.

What's" Your Personality Type?

Cheers

February's Book and A Writing Milestone

I thought that I would let you (whomever "you" may be) know what our book group has chosen for the February read. We will be doing "Sweetness in the Belly" by Camilla Gibb. I have just picked it up from the bookstore and I am really looking forward to reading it. Gibb was nominated for The Giller Prize for this novel and it has had a lot of good buzz around it, so I will certainly keep you posted on how it goes for me. On another note, I finally shared some of my creative writing. I get really ill at the thought of showing any of my fiction work to anyone, but I really trust the person I gave it to. I know that she will be honest and helpful. She is also a writer and keeps giving me a hard time for being so weird about getting my work "out there"! Anyway, I gave her the first chapter of a new project I just started and...drum roll please...she liked it, she really liked it! I still feel sick, but phew! I hope it will be easier next time. She gave me some helpful feedback and some pretty serious compliments too. So, yay for me! It's weird because I do freelance writing for magazines and newspapers (definitely not fiction) and I have no problem with that work being read and commented on. I guess I just don't get as attached to those projects as I do with my fiction. Well, now I have to press on with the fiction project because my reader wants to know what happens next, and I know she will give me a good swift kick in the arse if I let it slide too long! I would love to hear writing stories from you. Do you get sick thinking about sharing your work with others?? I would also love to know what you are reading right now...I'm am always looking to expand my list of books to read.
Cheers!

Nothing To Do With Books or Reading!

I am feeling wistful for summer so thought I would post my favourite picture from this past summer. We were visiting friends who have a beautiful farm and I captured this moment. I just love it. I love old barns and their's is a beauty. We had a wonderful day visiting with them and I can still feel the warmth of the sun on my back. I really need to recapture that warmth now. Winter finally hit us this weekend and I have been cold for three days. Even with our wood stove keeping us cozy, I am chilled to the bone! It was minus 16 degrees Celsius! I really can't complain since we did enjoy a prolonged fall season, but dang, it's cold!

Cheers!

2006 Literary Quiz Answers

With thanks to Ted Mumford and The Globe and Mail, http://www.globeandmail.com/, here are the answers for the 2006 Literary Quiz:

1. The Interpretation of Murder, The Thirteenth Tale and Water for Elephants were all picked by Heather Reisman, CEO and "chief booklover" of Indigo/Chapters.
2. Caryl Phillips wrote a) Dancing in the Dark, d) Strange Fruit and e) A Distant Shore. Carly Phillips wrote b) Summer Lovin', c) Erotic Invitation and f) Going All the Way.
3. Writers' paths:
a) bliss, building, booze: Mark Kingwell
b) India, Paris, China: Margaret MacMillan
c) talk, walk, me: Bill Bryson
4. While DQ is Dairy Queen, D&Q is Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal publisher of graphic novels.
5. Anita (Desai) was proud on Oct. 10 because her daughter Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss.
6. The who-am-I writer who punned on the title of a notorious novel, has a brother who heads a well-known institution and began publishing in 1975 is R. T. (Tom) Naylor.
7. The Frenchwoman who had both fiction and film treatments last fall is Marie Antoinette.
8. What Classic Cocktails, Secrets from the Vinyl Café and Christmas Days have in common is art by cartoonist Seth.
9. Unscrambled author names:
a) MORE AIM WITS: Miriam Toews
b) SADDAM HID RAD VICARS: David Adam Richards
c) NO TO TAB DENIAL: Alain de Botton
10. The pal of Joey's who got her own book last fall is Sheilagh Fielding (in The Custodian of Paradise, sequel to the Joey Smallwood novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams).
11. The venerable house said by some to have been reduced to a maple-leafed façade on a German branch plant is McClelland & Stewart.
12. The recent novel that bounces between the Torontos of the 1850s and 1990s is Consolation, by Michael Redhill.
13. The Canadian father and daughter who each got their own book treatment last fall are Frank and Belinda Stronach.
14. The real-life counterparts of fictional siblings Ben, Jude, Jemima, Harriet and Gus (Weiss) are Daniel, Noah, Emma, Martha and Jacob (Richler).
15. The aptly named Francine is literary stylist Francine Prose.
16. The novelist who is also a greengrocer is Jeanette Winterson.
17. Ethan, Kaitlin, Cowboy and Bree all work in the jPod, in the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name.
18. Michael R. LeGault (Think) is talking back to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink).
19. The mother-daughter duo of Globe journalists who published their first books last year are Cecily Ross (Love in the Time of Cholesterol) and Leah McLaren (The Continuity Girl).
20. Laurie Gough got the title Kiss the Sunset Pig from a lyric in Joni Mitchell's song California.
21. It's Bill, not George, who's in the kitchen. (Both Bill Buford and George Monbiot published books titled Heat last year.)
22. The Toronto book retailer whose 30th birthday was feted in several ads in The Globe's Books section is Book City.
23. Attawan (John Bemrose's The Island Walkers) is a lot like Manawaka (of Margaret Laurence's fiction) in that they're both fictional places based on their respective authors' home towns.
24. The epochal event that recently occurred at The New York Review of Books was the death of founding co-editor Barbara Epstein.
25. The author who died in 1942 who had a bestseller last year is Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française).
26. What Claire Messud, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Jay McInerney have all been writing about is 9/11.
27. The who-am-I bookman who was a commando in the Second World War, was landed in prison by ivory and worked with McLuhan, Frye, Richler, Callaghan and Munro is Kildare Dobbs.
28. The magazine whose moniker could be updated to Pen & Paper is Quill & Quire.
29. The one degree of separation between
a) Steven Spielberg and Barbara Amiel is George Jonas
b) Audrey Tatou and Yann Martel is Jean-Pierre Jeunet
c) Whitney Houston and W. P. Kinsella is Kevin Costner
30. The recent novel that was advertised as "Ripping the facade off peaceable Canadian multiculturalism" is Governor of the Northern Province, by Randy Boyagoda.
31. Real-life figures at the heart of novels:
a) The Forest Lover: Emily Carr
b) The Communist's Daughter: Norman Bethune
c) The Master: Henry James
32. The book every Vincent Lam completist needs is The Flu Pandemic and You.
33. How did Madison Avenue recently put St. Urbain Street back on the map? Madison Books, named for Madison Avenue in Toronto, published Mordecai Richler was Here, an anthology of work by the writer whose touchstone was St. Urbain Street.
34. The sort of book that both Art (Spiegelman) and Bernice (Eisenstein) have published is a graphic-novel memoir about being a child of Holocaust survivors.
35. Leonard (Cohen) read to Pierre Trudeau on Nancy (Southam's) roof (in Book of Longing).
36. Fiction is the correct bookstore category for each of A Short History of Indians in Canada, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
37. The recent Canadian book that suffers from toponymania is The Geist Atlas of Canada.
38. André (Breton), Max (Ernst), Marcel (Duchamp) and Marc (Chagall) all stayed at the Villa Air-Bel, as related in Rosemary Sullivan's book of that name.
39. Corrected titles:
a) The Bedside Book of Birds
b) This is Your Brain on Music
c) De Niro's Game
40. America's "poet lariat" was Will Rogers -- but we also accepted Bloodgood Cutter, who was so dubbed by Mark Twain.

Sadly, I had 2 wrong. For #22 I had Toronto Women's Bookstore (which did celebrate their 30th this year as well) and for #40 I had Donald Rumsfeld (LOL). That answer was based on my finding out that a writer actually published a book of poetry with "prose" taken from speeches and media moments with Rumsfeld. It was a crapshoot! :) I am a bit bummed because last year I did get them all right! Oh well, there is always next year!!

Cheers!

Reading List

Here is my current list of books to read. It is long and unruly (okay, it's mildly "ruly" as it is alphabetical by author's first name) and possibly daunting. Some of these books have been on there for far too long. The most recent book to be struck off this list was "Alligator" by Lisa Moore which I loved! It was nominated for the Giller Award in 2005 and was on my list from at least the spring of that year. I had such high expectations as I had heard so much about this book. I sometimes specifically put off reading a book so as not to be disappointed. This happened with Lori Lansen's book "The Girls". I loved her first novel "Rush Home Road" and then had the opportunity to meet her and chat with her. She was just so lovely and gracious and the reading she did from "The Girls" actually brought tears to my eyes. There was no way I was going to read this book because I was so afraid it would let me down, that Lori (we're on a first name basis now...lol) would let me down. Well, our book group chose it as the October 2006 book, so I had to bite the bullet. I loved, loved, loved it. It has become one of my favourite books of all time and, of course, I am kicking myself for being such a chicken! So, here are my books to read list:

Adam Langer - Crossing California
Alice McDermott - Charming Billy
Angie Day - The Way To Someone
Ann Enright - What Are You Like?
Ann Lamott - All New People
Ann Patchett - Bel Canto
Arthur Phillip - Prague
Bill Broder - Taking Care of Cleo
Bruce Bauman - And the Word Was
Carter Clay - Elizabeth Evans
Charles Baxter - The Feast of One
Charles J. Shields - Mockingbird
Cheryl Mendlesohn - Morningside Heights
Christopher Wilson - Cotton
Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy
Donald Antrim - The Afterlife
Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men
Francoise Dorner - The Woman in the Row Behind
Frederick Busch - Girls
Irene Nemirovsky - Suite Francaise
Jane Goodall - Through a Window
John McGahern - By the Lake
Jonathan Coe - Closed Circle
Jonathan Coe - The Rotters Club
Joshlyn Jackson - Between Georgia
Julia Glass - Three Junes
Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without a Country
Larry Brown - Joe
Lawrence Douglas - The Catastrophist
Louann Brizendine - The Female Brain
Louise Redd - Hangover Soup
Lynne Hinton - The Things I Know Best
M. A. Harper - The Worst Day of My Life, So Far
Mark Childress - One Mississippi
Martha McPhee - L'America
Matthew Pearl - Poe Shadow
Nina Solomon - Single Wife
Richard Russo - Straight Man
Robert Cohen - Inspired Sleep
Sheila Kohler - Cracks
Stephen Goodwin - Breaking Her Fall
Susan Straight - Highwire Moon
Tim Flannery - The Weather Makers
Tom Perrotta - Little Children (which has been on my list for ages, I didn't even know it was being made into a movie!)
Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Wallace Earle Stegner - Angel of Repose
Zadie Smith - On Beauty

I am open to suggestions - what is your favourite book of all time and why should I read it (or add it to my list)? C'mon, make me want to read your favourite book!

Cheers!

New Year's Hello

It has been awhile since my last posting. Life always gets so busy around Christmas and New Year's, but I have survived another one relatively unscathed! I guess I don't even know where to begin. A lot has gone on since last month, but I'm not feeling in a particularly sharing mood! Rather contradictary to the whole blogging purpose I guess, but what can I do? I would encourage you to check out the links I have posted. They are all interesting, to me anyway, and I hope that you will enjoy them too. I guess I will chat a bit about books. If you know of any great blogs that have to do with reading, books or writing (creative fiction, but no fantasy, sci-fi or romance please) then let me know. I love reading and writing and I am always looking for other sites of people who share these interests. I do belong to a book group that meets each month. We just did "Ivanhoe" for our January book and will be doing "Sweetness in the Belly" by Camilla Gibb for our February book. Other books that we have done recently include: "Middlemarch", "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", "March" and "Small Island". My favourite book from last year was "The Ha-Ha" by Dave King. My favourite book of all time is probably "To Kill a Mockingbird", and I am really interested in reading the new biography about Harper Lee. There are just so many good books that it is hard to choose just one favourite. I also loved "The Girls" by Lori Lansens and "Fall on Your Knees" by Ann Marie MacDonald. That gives you a general idea of the type of reading I like to do so if you have some suggestions on other blogs or websites that are worth checking out, please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know about it.
Cheers and Happy New Year!

Literary Quiz

So here is the Globe and Mail's annual literary quiz that had me stretching my wee brain. I managed to answer all of the questions again this year, so now it is up to the decision maker at the G&M: Ted Mumford. Winners will be announced sometime in January.

1.Who picked The Interpretation of Murder, The Thirteenth Tale and Water for Elephants?
2.Which of the following are by Caryl Phillips and which are by Carly Phillips?
a)Dancing in the Dark; b) Summer Lovin'; c) Erotic Invitation; d) Strange Fruit; e) A Distant Shore; f) Body Heat.
3.What writer's path? (The last clue is a book published this fall.)
a) bliss, building, booze b) India, Paris, China c) talk, walk, me.
4.DQ is Dairy Queen. What's D&Q?
5.What reason did Anita have to be proud on Oct. 10?
6.The title of my recent book is a pun on that of a notorious novel. My brother heads a well-known institution. My first book was published in 1975. Who am I?
7.What Frenchwoman has had both fiction and film treatments this fall?
8.What do Classic Cocktails, Secrets from the Vinyl Café and Christmas Days have in common?
9.Unscramble these author names:
a) MORE AIM WITS
b) SADDAM HID RAD VICAR
c) NO TO TAB DENIAL
10.What pal of Joey's got her own book this fall?
11.What venerable house is said by some to have been reduced to a maple-leafed façade on a German branch plant?
12.What recent novel bounces between the Torontos of the 1850s and 1990s?
13.What Canadian father and daughter each got their own book treatment this fall?
14.Who are the real-life counterparts of fictional siblings Ben, Jude, Jemima, Harriet and Gus?
15.Which Francine is aptly named?
16.What novelist is also a greengrocer?
17.Where do Ethan, Kaitlin, Cowboy and Bree all work?
18.Who is Michael R. LeGault talking back to?
19.What mother-daughter duo of Globe journalists published their first books this year?
20.Where did Laurie Gough get the title Kiss the Sunset Pig?
21.Who's in the kitchen, George or Bill?
22.What Toronto book retailer's 30th birthday was recently feted in several ads in The Globe's books section?
23.How is Attawan a lot like Manawaka?
24.What epochal event recently occurred at The New York Review of Books?
25.What author who died in 1942 had a bestseller this year?
26.What have Claire Messud, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Jay McInerney all been writing about?
27.I was a commando in the Second World War. Ivory landed me in prison in Tanganyika. In publishing, I worked with McLuhan, Frye, Richler, Callaghan and Munro. Who am I?
28.What magazine's moniker, if updated, would be Pen & Paper?
29.What's the one degree of separation between these people?
a)Steven Spielberg and Barbara Amiel; b) Audrey Tatou and Yann Martel; c) Whitney Houston and W. P. Kinsella.
30.What recent novel has been advertised as "Ripping the facade off peaceable Canadian multiculturalism"?
31.What real-life figure is at the heart of these novels?
a) The Forest Lover; b) The Communist's Daughter; c) The Master.
32.What book does every Vincent Lam completist need?
33.How did Madison Avenue recently put St. Urbain Street back on the map?
34.What sort of book have both Art and Bernice published? (Be specific.)
35.Who did Leonard read to on Nancy's roof?
36.Give the correct bookstore category for each of these books:
a) A Short History of Indians in Canada; b) A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian; c) Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
37.What recent Canadian book suffers from toponymania?
38.Where did André, Max, Marcel and Marc all stay?
39.Correct the titles of these recent books:
a) The Bedside Book of Bats; b) This is Your Brain on Drugs; c) Pacino's Game
40.Who was America's "poet lariat"?

This took up an enormous amount of my time for two weeks. There were two questions in particular that I was just stuck on for the longest time, but finally I figured them out and I felt such sweet relief! Now that I am finished with this for another year, I can focus on Christmas again. Most of the shopping is done and the lights are up on the front of the house. I am playing Christmas music to try and help me feel a little more festive and will be deciding on my baking in the next couple of days. There just never seems to be enough time in December!

Great Canadian Literary Quiz

It is the 11th year for the Globe and Mail's annual literary stump fest! I get so geekily excited about this every year and look forward to the pain that is created in my brain by trying to answer all 4o questions. I am about half way there at this point and hope to have another perfect score. Last year I did manage to get every answer and even won a lovely consolation prize of a G&M t-shirt. First, second and third place winners received gift certificates for Indigo Books last year which is a bit of a conundrum for me should I actually win this year. I generally support the independent book sellers and stay away from the big box book emporiums and really only do the quiz for the challenge it offers. Of course if I was really in it only for the challenge, I guess I wouldn't submit my answers for consideration, would I?? Hmmm...

Welcome to Reading Juniper

So, here it is. Of course I'm not really sure what "it" is, but I guess the "it" will be revealed along the way. I imagine this to be a place where I offer up thoughts on the books I am reading or the writing I am working on, but knowing me, there will be tangents that I go off on. As with most things in life, it will be a journey. Wish me well!