More than 40 years later, this gift is still with me, and still makes me weep.

May 30, 2020 — Some gifts just keep on giving, and this omnibus hard-cover edition of The World of Pooh, which includes A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, is one I have returned to again and again.

I reviewed the book(s) back in 2010 — I see now I posted it on my 45th birthday —, and have re-read the books more than once in the intervening decade, so I can confidently state that I love Milne's masterpiece in my fifties as much as I did in my forties (and thirties, and twenties).

Wednesday, May 27, 2020 — Though I didn't know it in 2012, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn probably marked the beginning of my dis-enchantment with the work of Steven Moffat, who would go on to do god-awful things to Doctor Who. I admit, I haven't re-watched his bizarrely over-complicated take on Hergé's classic comic series, Tintin, but I have little doubt I would react more or less the same was today as I did in 2012. (Click the headline above for the full review.)

'Well, you know, I just — I was thinkin' that I'd just nip it in the bud. Before it gets worse. 'Cause they were talkin' in health class about how pregnancy can lead to ... an infant.'

It's not giving much away to say that Juno MacGuff does not nip her pregnancy, "in the bud" or otherwise. Instead, after a brief flirtation with abortion, the 16 year-old opts to carry the foetus to term and give the baby up for adoption. Significantly, Juno is not punished for her transgression (except insofar as the pregnancy itself meet be considered a punishment) persons seeking in the entrails of Juno any overt anti-abortion, pro-choice, pro- or anti-sex or other coded messages are in for a serious disappointment. The movie's eponymous title gives the game away. Juno is a story about (nearly) a year in the life of a teenage girl named "Juno". It is not an issue movie, or a cautionary tale, or a call to arms. The fact that Juno is about a pregnant 16 year-old girl does not mean it is "about" teenage pregnancy. At its heart and despite its subject-matter, Juno is a romantic comedy. Where we might once have had Katherine Hepburn as a wise-cracking career-woman in a man's world, we now have Ellen Page as a wise-cracking teenager, who is every bit as independent as Hepburn ever was, if in a very different world. (Spoilers ahead, but not many; this is a movie whose surprises are worth keeping.)

Fʀɪᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 17, 2020 — If art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, so too is filth. Back in 2012, I saw Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan's then-current, and ever-so-serious psychological drama film, Chloe, around the same time that I saw Matthew Vaughn's controversial super-hero movie, Kick-Ass. I thought the world of one, and held the other in contempt. Read on to find out which was which.

Allen Carr's Way was easy for me

Tᴜᴇsᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 14, 2020 — I was a smoker for many years, starting in my teens. It seems almost impossible to believe, now, that I was utterly addicted to cigarettes for decades, going so far as to walk around collecting butts during bad times.

I stopped smoking in the fall of 2009, now more than a full decade in my past. And I don't think I would have done it without help from Alan Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Read more ...

Dylan was already a long-standing legend when I reviewed this memoir back in 2004 (to which I made some minor corrections when I posted it here in 2009). Since then, he has won the Nobel Prize for literature and, very recently, seems to have taken up song-writing again. Which Pati Smith's memoir, Just Kids, Chronicles Volume One remains one of the most interesting musician's memoir I've ever read.

Samuel R. Delany (2012?). Photo lifted from his Facebook page.

June 21, 2020 — Now 78 years old, Samuel R. Delany is a multiple award-winning writer and a retired professor of English literature. He is best known as a science fiction writer, but his work encompasses not only that genre, but fantasy, comics and pornography, as well as non-fiction.

His first novel was published in the early 1960s, when he was still a teenager, and his most recent (which I have on order) was published only last week. He is, to my mind, still the best living American writer, and his 2012 masterpiece, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, was a radical (and very successful — I hope to have a review of it up here soon!) fusion of gay erotica with science fiction.

Despite the genres mentioned above, Delany's books are anything but alike; he is a writer forever exploring and both de- and re-constructing genre tropes and conventions.

So, when I bought Dark Reflections back in 2009, I was not really surprised to be surprised by just how very different that novel was from those that had come before.

Read more ...

This review was originally published on June 6, 2009. Links and pricing information may be out of date.

 

 

Sometime in 2007, I sent in a review of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, Sixty Days and Counting, on spec to The Globe and Mail. When they didn't reply in what I considered a reasonable length of time, I shrugged and posted it to my Livejournal account and finally remembered to republish it here. Read more ... But sometimes good things take time. More than a year later, I received an email from an editor at the Globe saying he understood I was interested in reviewing things science fictional and would I be interested in taking a stab Gregory Maguire's latest. Naturally, I said yes, very much so, and another four or so months later, the following showed up in the Globe's Books section. It remains my only paid review; if any of you reading this are editors, I am still open to offers.

Tᴜᴇsᴅᴀʏ, Aᴘʀɪʟ 14, 2020 — You wouldn't think it necessary to review a 75 year-old pulp novel in the 21st century, but Ayn Rand's stupid and vicious philosophy has had a profound impact on western societies for the past 40 years at least.

I am pretty proud of my review of Atlas Shrugged, which I wrote back in 2008, and I stand by everything I said then about that morally execrable novel. Read more by clicking the headline above above ...