Masters of Doom

The early days of home computers and video games has always been a particular interest of mine. In fact, it's my stock answer for the "if you had a time machine" question - while I would love to visit all sorts of historical periods, I'd probably fare a bit better…

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I read Big Magic.

I'd been hearing about Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic for a long time, about how wonderful and inspiring it was for creatively-driven people. I'd even heard that it was life-changing. And, I admit, when I hear something is life-changing, I tend to shy away. I have a natural distrust of things that…

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Food in writing

As I wrote about last year when I read Ethan Frome, descriptions of meals in books are one of the things that really catch my attention when I'm reading. I like to imagine how all the elements of the meal work together. I read this description recently in Margaret Drabble's The…

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Connected to history

Memorial plaques for three of the family members of Plum Johnson, author of the memoir They Left us Everything (check it out at amazon.ca or amazon.com), which I mentioned in a recent entry. I would hesitate to call this "history," but seeing these plaques (I had forgotten they were there, so…

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The Outward Room

I wondered how it was that I had never heard of this book and its extraordinarily promising young author. I asked around, but no one seemed to know or remember Millen Brand, or his books. It's somewhat frightening to learn that good books - even books heralded in their time…

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Tripping over the carpet

Days that feel like older days. Lazy suburban summer drives, windows open, listening to a short story read on the radio. Sitting by the lake for an interminable length of time. Browsing at the bookstore I used to spend so much time in, tripping over the carpet. While my mother looks at…

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