margietaylor

"The time will come in your life, it will almost certainly come, when the voice of God will thunder at you from a cloud, 'From this day forth thou shalt not be able to put on thine own socks.'" So begins one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors. You may know [...]

    My bookshelf contains a number of books written by friends and/or colleagues, and one of the best is this one, by Karin Wells, a former CBC radio producer and three-time recipient of the Canadian Association of Journalists documentary award. The subtitle is When Women Shut Down Government in the Battle for the Right [...]

"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous  blond Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up [...]

I think I first picked up this book after trying, and failing, to read Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's autobiographical epic, In Search of Lost Time. At 1.25 million words, reading Proust requires a commitment; I was working on a novel of my own at the time, holding down a job at [...]

Ten years before the writers and poets of the Beat Generation burst onto the scene with "Howl", Naked Lunch, and On The Road, Somerset Maugham devoted his most ambitious novel to the themes of Eastern mysticism and the search for meaning in an increasingly materialistic world. It wasn't the first time Americans had embraced these [...]

I came late to David Sedaris. By late, I mean that I first read his essays in 2013 when I bought a copy of Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls for a friend's birthday. She'd been telling me how much she enjoyed his writing and I figured this would be a welcome present. Turns out it [...]

I probably didn't need COVID as an excuse to re-read P. G. Wodehouse, but I will say that going back to one of my favourite writers has given me a much-needed sense of comfort in these stressful times. There is something soothing about retreating into a world where there are gentle rules that must not [...]

This is my bookshelf. Well, one of them, anyway. This is the one in my bedroom next to the window. I have other bookshelves in other parts of the apartment but this is my go-to bookshelf, the one where I keep books I'm likely to read again. Books, I should add, that are NOT for [...]

Every Wednesday night I attend a writers’ workshop here in Coquitlam, BC. We take turns reading what we’ve written that week, and offer up our feedback on what we hear. It’s a great chance to see what works and what doesn’t, and, for someone who spends most of the day alone with her computer, it’s [...]