Category: What I’m Reading

I’ve been reading up a storm since I returned from the wilds of rural Costa Rica, a place where the humidity curls book covers and forces an avid reader like me onto my tablet. E-books just don’t give me the reading experience I crave, though. I need to hold onto a real book. Luckily, the…

Elbows up, fellow Canuck readers!  Between avoiding Amazon, American strawberries, and travel south of the border, why not check out some new Canadian titles? I recently enjoyed three very different ones released this year by women authors, two of whom are from Vancouver! You don’t have to be a fellow Canadian, though, to enjoy these…

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, famous literary characters…

“The days are long but the years are short.” Wise words, but they didn’t originate from the pen of the ancient Roman sage of Stoicism, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC- AD 65). A modern-day American author, Gretchen Rubin, coined the meme-ready phrase in her bestseller “The Happiness Project” to remind young, sleep-deprived, exhausted parents that…

Technology writer Nicholas Carr is a fellow Cassandra. For those not up on their Greek mythology, Cassandra was the original #metoo victim who spurned the sexual overtures of Apollo. In return, he cursed her to become a prophetess whom no one would ever believe.  I’ve been channelling my inner Cassandra for over twenty years, issuing stark warnings…

The worst culture shock I ever experienced wasn’t over chopsticks in Beijing or about the suffocating heat of Bangkok. It happened when we moved home to Vancouver after living abroad for many years. Canada was supposed to be familiar to me. Yet, I felt completely out of synch with everything around me, including my own life. …