Open Secrets by Alice Munro - M&S, 1994 - Alice Munro, short story writer, Nobel prize laureate in literature (2013), winner of the Giller prize (1998 & 2004) and other notable awards, was credited with ‘revolutionizing the structure of the short story’. She died last May and there I was, living in close proximity …
Month: May 2024
THE WEIGHT OF INK BY RACHEL KADISH
THE WEIGHT OF INK BY RACHEL KADISH, Houghton Mifflin, 2017 - Helen Watt is an aging historian at a middling university in London. She has lived a solitary life, devoting herself to her work without producing anything of significance. On the cusp of retiring and beset by a debilitating illness she receives a call from …
THE ARMOR OF LIGHT BY KEN FOLLETT
The Armor of Light by Ken Follett, Viking, 2023 - Ken Follett’s latest book is the fourth in the series that began with ‘Pillars of the Earth’, set in medieval times and continued with ‘Column of Fire’, set in Elizabethan times. ‘The Evening and the Morning’ came next as a prequel to ‘Pillars of Fire’ …
DUNE PART ONE
DUNE PT. 1, 2021 - directed by Denis Villeneuve - It seems reasonable that if you pay $165 million to make a movie and collect $407 million in box office receipts, you can consider yourself successful. The profit may not be quite as good as Star Wars, which cost only $11 million to produce and made …
THE HALF-WAY HOUSE OF STUDENT PROTESTS
We haven’t seen student protests like those now underway on the campuses around North America since the American military was dropping bombs, napalm and agent orange on the Vietnamese. Fair enough, it is difficult to watch the brutal attack on Gaza without wanting to run around waving Palestinians flags and calling for an end to …
Richard's Left Bank 