Phew. My apologies to subscribers. It’s been a wild and crazy few weeks.
Between multiple trips to and from Halifax - because in Nova Scotia all healthcare involves driving to and from Halifax - and a handful of genuine paying gigs writing on various topics, and finally getting our new roof done, there has been little time for recreational writing.
So: in the Globe and Mail I wrote about the myriad ways that you can get insurance on your rental car. Hint: not from Hertz.
And hats off to Interlock and Maritime Permanent Roofing for a superb roofing experience. Not cheap mind you, but overall we were very happy with the result, and with the absolutely professional and pleasant Mexican crew who did the install.
My other goal this year has been a simple one: to get back into reading books again. I’ve realized that the Kindle just doesn’t do it for me. I need a real book, with pages and a cover. The physical, tangible object matters a lot.
A driving force behind this has been the move from Twitter/X to BlueSky, the new social media platform started in part by the former boss of Twitter before Elon destroyed it. The best part of BlueSky is that it’s really easy to block the idiots and the time-wasters, and best of all, your “Following” tab literally only shows you the people you have elected to follow. Plus you can make that restriction as narrow or wide as you choose.
Somehow Bluesky has managed to attract many great writers, all of whom are civilised, and thoughtful, and tend to suggest other writers’ work to anyone with an interest. All of which has led me to:
None but the Righteous is a book that I savoured, and read ever so slowly, because the writing is just amazing and wonderful. Chantal James is a Washington DC writer with strong ties to the South, and her book is very much worth your time.
In seventeenth-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones. Four centuries later, amid the havoc of Hurricane Katrina, nineteen-year-old Ham escapes New Orleans with his only valued possession: a pendant handed down from his foster mother, Miss Pearl. There’s something about the pendant that has always gripped him, and the curiosity of it has grown into a kind of comfort.
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a joyous romp. Funny, dark and thought provoking, by Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite. This was suggested by one of the employees at Kings Co-op Books, who described how she wound up reading the whole thing in one go, unable to put it down.
I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood. Most people use bleach indiscriminately, assuming it is a catchall product, never taking the time to read the list of ingredients on the back, never taking the time to return to the recently wiped surface to take a closer look. Bleach will disinfect, but it’s not great for cleaning residue, so I use it only after I have first scrubbed the bathroom of all traces of life, and death.
Nettle and Bone is a wonderful fantasy, and a Hugo winner (though the Hugo results from Chengdu are hotly challenged) by American author T. Kingfisher.
The bone dog came alive at dusk. It was not quite completed, but it was close. She was bent over the left front paw when the skull's jaws yawned open and it stretched as if waking from a long slumber. "Hush," she told it. "I'm nearly done-"
It sat up. Its mouth opened and the ghost of a wet tongue touched her face like fog.
She scratched the skull where the base of the ears would be. Her nails made a soft scraping sound on the pale surface.
The bone dog wagged its tail, its pelvis, and most of its spine with delight.
"Sit still," she told it, picking up the front paw. "Sit, and let me finish."
It sat politely. The hollow eye sockets gazed up at her. Her heart contracted painfully.
The love of a bone dog, she thought, bending her head down over the paw again. All that I am worth these days.
Then again, few humans were truly worth the love of a living dog. Some gifts you could never deserve.
Devout is a very interesting book for me. On one hand, it describes how a devout evangelical American handles serious mental illness within the context of faith. On the other hand it also describes the conventional medical processes and treatments that surround mental illness. I’m someone who has struggled with serious depression, but who has utterly no connection to religion, so the book was both thought-provoking and an education for me.
In this revelatory memoir, Anna Gazmarian tells the story of how her evangelical upbringing in North Carolina failed to help her understand the mental health diagnosis she received, and the work she had to do to find proper medical treatment while also maintaining her faith.
When Anna is diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2011, she’s faced with a conundrum: while the diagnosis provides clarity about her manic and depressive episodes, she must confront the stigma that her evangelical community attaches to her condition. Over the course of ten years, we follow Anna on her journey to reframe her understanding of mental health to expand the limits of what her religious practice can offer.
Now, a special request from me. Don’t order these from Amazon.com. Order them from your local bookshop, and pick them up in person. I support Lunenburg Bound, paying a sometimes higher price, but I know that the money goes towards keeping them going. I also shop in Halifax at Kings Co-op Bookstore - arguably the best hidden bookstore in the Maritimes - and at Agricola Street Books.
Aside for Liverpool, where we’re living, pretty much every town big enough to have a downtown will have a bookstore. They can all order in what you want, and do so quickly. Best of all though, you quickly get to know the book-sellers, and they get to know you. You build a relationship, and ultimately that makes the whole experience much better.
Plus, inevitably, you wind up picking up other books that ordinarily you wouldn’t have thought of. The books that aren’t necessarily on any top ten list, but which enrich and enlighten your world.
And which, sitting on your shelves, tell people something important about you.
In these times of always-on social media franticness it’s actually very, very good for the soul to set aside the phone and just settle into a nice, printed book. And in an age when all over North America, but especially in Canada, newspapers are being gutted, reporters fired, and newsgathering is seen as just not important, it still matters to keep up the reading habit.
There are powerful people who want to keep you stupid and ill-informed. Reading books will protect you.