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 Links and pricing information may be out of date.

 

 

October 12, 2020 — I imagine that most of us these days have their personal "favourites" among well-made television programs that, in the end (or sooner), we felt betrayed by.

I never did watch Lost and I bailed on Game of Thrones a few episodes after the red wedding. I had been enjoying the show, but also realized that I couldn't identify most of the characters by name, which is never a good sign. From all I've heard and read since the finale, I missed much style but little substance.

I did, though, watch all of Battlestar Galactica, including its side-series, and had my fingers crossed right to the bitter end that show-runner Ronald D. Moore knew what he was doing.

More fool, I.

I haven't revisited the show since I reviewed the finale back on the 22nd of March, 2009, but I have no doubt I would still agree with my younger self if I were to do it. "Explaining" 71 episodes and two movies worth of plot and mysteries by saying that "God did it" has to rank very near the top of the cop-out hall-of-fame.

I've given away the ending, but if you'd like to read my original review, click here. (Note: I modified the original headline, which read: "Not with a bang: The end of Battlestar Galactica through the mother of all SF cliches".

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.

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. Read more ...

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 ...

Dog at rest outside our house in Two Mountains, Quebec, circa 1971.

Like many things from childhood, memories of favourite pets are, rightfully, suspect. A child has so little to compare their first pet with, that no one should take a 55 year-old man too seriously when he proclaims that his dog was the best dog. Nevertheless, I do make that claim. And I am supported in that belief not only by my parents and my younger brother, but by my late Uncle Marcel, as well as more than one of my cousins. Uncle Marcel spoke about the pleasure he took in visits from Dog after we had moved out of the second-floor apartment he had rented to my family for a couple of years. Dog would arrive at his old home, wet from swimming la Rivieres des Prairies from what was then the Town of Two Mountains to Laval Ouest, stay awhile and then go off on whatever missions a dog would have. (Yes, it was a very different world in the 1970s; nowadays animal control would no doubt have picked Dog up toute suite.) Anyway, whether Dog was as exceptional an animal as he looms in my memory, and the memories of others, he was my best friend for most of my early childhood. And I am not ashamed to say that I miss him still. Read more ...