I tried for a week and a half to get through 23 pages of a "literary" novel I ended up abandoning, but have spent the past two hours completely engrossed in a book based on the Dragon Age video game series. Draw from that any conclusions you will. (I was…
This 1945 penny was in my change from the grocery store in 2010, and it's one of my most prized possessions. I’m not really a monarchist, but I like to imagine the way the world was when this coin was new. In the grander scheme of history, it's very recent,…
Reading descriptions of food in books is maybe one of my favourite things. I often read the descriptions two or three times, imagining how the combinations work and comparing the food to what I'm already familiar with. Recently I read a food description in Ethan Frome that was among the…
There are some writers who I enjoy as writers more than I enjoy their writing. Stephen King is one of them. Doris Lessing is another. That's not to say I dislike their writing, but I don't respond to it as well as to what they say about the practice of being…
My friend Teri has an article in the latest Ricepaper, titled Between Representations: Filipinos in Canadian Literature. Teri's one of my favourite writers so I am always eager to read anything she writes, but I was especially excited to read this. She and I are both half-Filipino, and have talked in…
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with my brother, and making that long suburban walk to the arcade on summer afternoons. In high school and my early twenties, I dropped the hobby for a while mainly due to lack of a console…
One of Decca's favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that "frenemy" (which she sometimes spelled "frienemy") was "an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was…
Arrived back at Joan's just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy's arrival and has planned his whole Easter…
But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn't make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, 'What I really wanted to be was a writer.' So I had…
Since I last cooked from my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton's Household Management, I've wanted to try another recipe. I marked out a few contenders that didn't necessitate sourcing a pheasant or a sheep's head, and today's lunch was: Carrot Soup with Rice. Here's the recipe: Ingredients - 2 pints of white…
