As a new(ish) mom, I’m always on the lookout for books that share the intimate and less rosy parts of becoming and being a mother. This book is focused on the pregnancy itself, and promised to do just that. I’ve never read anything by Lucy Knisley before, though I have a couple of her
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TOP TEN TUESDAY | FAVOURITE MEMOIRS
Technically the topic this week is “Books From My Favourite Genre” but since that would probably be literary fiction, it felt a bit broad and somewhat of a cop-out. So instead I’ve chosen memoirs, as it’s a genre I have been reading more of lately, and have definitely found some of my favourite books
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES – SHIRLEY JACKSON
I discovered this book thanks to Acacia Ives, who mentioned it in one of her reading wrap-ups. I’d heard of Shirley Jackson, of course, but since most of her stories are of the terrifying variety, and I am a wimp through and through, I discounted her as one of those authors I’d never be
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS – GERALD DURRELL
This is an interesting memoir in that it is part childhood recollection and family saga, part travel memoir, and part the origins of a budding naturalist. I didn’t expect to be overly interested in Durrell’s exploration of the natural world he discovered when his family packed up and moved to Corfu. But his own
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CANADA READS REVIEW | FORGIVENESS – MARK SAKAMOTO
This is the true story of Mark Sakamoto’s grandparents’ experiences during WWII and how those experiences shaped their lives – but also how they chose to take back control in spite of them. The first section of the book alternates between two stories. His maternal grandfather’s experiences as a young soldier sent to Hong
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | M TRAIN – PATTI SMITH
This book took me by surprise. I read Just Kids earlier this year after hearing a lot of buzz about it, but not really knowing much about Patti Smith herself. Perhaps because I didn’t come to her book as a fan of her as an artist, I didn’t have the same craving for celebrity
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | WHY NOT ME? – MINDY KALING
I’ve got a confession to make. Before reading this book, I’d never watched Mindy’s show The Mindy Project. I’d also meant to but never got around to reading her first memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? despite having heard fantastic things. So when I had the chance to review her new book, I
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | WICKED AND WEIRD – RICH TERFRY
Rich Terfry is a Canadian public figure – I use that term because I can’t think of a better one for a man who has been an (almost pro) baseball player, a hip hop artist and a CBC radio presenter – and is now an author. He is better known by many as “Buck 65,”
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | HYPERBOLE AND A HALF – ALLIE BROSH
I’ve been a fan of Allie Brosh’s blog, also called Hyperbole and a Half, for quite some time now. So though I was given this book a while ago (thanks, Martha!), I’ve been saving it and saving it. Not only are Allie Brosh’s drawings fantastic, but the words she puts with them have been
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BOOK REVIEW | ON THE MOVE – OLIVER SACKS
An impassioned, tender, and joyous memoir by the author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has
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BOOK REVIEW | CRIME SEEN – KATE LINES
A criminal profiler, trained at Quantico, former Chief Superintendent of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Kate Lines recounts her remarkable story using pivotal cases she worked on in the course of her career. How does a farm girl from Ennismore enter a male-dominated field and become a top criminal profiler and groundbreaking leader? For
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | JUST KIDS – PATTI SMITH
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME – ALEXANDRA FULLER
Looking to rebuild after a painful divorce, Alexandra Fuller turns to her African past for clues to living a life fully and without fear. A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of 2 deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered.
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | EX LIBRIS – ANNE FADIMAN
Anne Fadiman is–by her own admission–the sort of person who learned about sex from her father’s copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate’s 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | SO ANYWAY… – JOHN CLEESE
Candid and brilliantly funny, this is the story of how a tall, shy youth from Weston-super-Mare went on to become a self-confessed legend. En route, John Cleese describes his nerve-racking first public appearance, at St Peter’s Preparatory School at the age of eight and five-sixths; his endlessly peripatetic home life with parents who seemed incapable
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL – LENA DUNHAM
“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told,” writes Lena Dunham, and it certainly takes guts to share the stories that make up her first book, Not That Kind of Girl. These are stories about getting your butt touched by your boss,
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | MY SALINGER YEAR – JOANNA RAKOFF
Poignant, keenly observed, and irresistibly funny: a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet,
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THE SUNDAY REVIEW | 84, CHARING CROSS ROAD & THE DUCHESS OF BLOOMSBURY STREET – HELENE HANFF
“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me! I owe it so much. In 1949 Helene Hanff, ‘a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books,’ wrote to Marks & Co. Booksellers of 84 Charing Cross Rd, in search of rare editions she was unable to find in
