By JK, on April 24th, 2012 Anyone who’s been in my garden, talked gardening with me, or even been a frequent guest on this site, will know of my love for Gayla Trail’s gardening books and blog. Steph and I could get WWGD (What Would Gayla Do?) bracelets, we refer to her so often. This spring she brought out a new book, Easy Growing, which focuses on herbs and edible flowers. While we grew some herbs last year, this book was probably the push that got us to embrace edible flowers this year. (We’re taking the easy route to start, using Urban Harvest’s edible flowers mix.) Like my perennial favourite Grow Great Grub, Easy Growing is packed with essential info and gorgeous photographs, but really stands out from other garden writing because of its grounded advice that keeps it real and makes gardening a possibility for anyone. (Yes, anyone.)
JK: I learned to garden from you, but where did you pick up your initial gardening know-how?
GT: Oh wow. You’ve already made me a bit teary. I grew my first successful in-ground food garden while I lived in a student house in the summer of 1993 without consulting anything at all. I do believe that we got [...]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for another edition of the brief book club bulletin that is Books in 140 Seconds. Last time Erin and I talked Jessica Grant’s Making Light of Tragedy, and this time we’re moving on to another accomplished collection: this time of walks around Toronto in Shawn Micallef’s Stroll. Here’s what we thought:
Our apologies to Shawn for mispronouncing his name — I heard it on Metro Morning the day after recorded this and realized we’d garbled it.
Not only is it a lovely time of year to go strolling, June also marks the return of the Stroll City project. @Reply your Toronto observations and experiences to @StrollCity, and they might just appear on TTC screens across the city. Here’s one of my recent faves:
Now don’t you want to hit the streets of T.O.? Our next Books in 140 Seconds will bring you another slice of Toronto, this one fictional, when we talk about Stuart Ross’s Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. It’s a short one, so feel free to pick it up and read along. And if you need any encouragement to read it, head over to Bella’s Bookshelves to read Steph’s wonderful post about Stuart [...]
Sometimes a book and I will get off on the wrong foot. Something will turn me off, but usually I soldier on out of a sense of obligation. What I hope for is for the book to redeem itself, to reward my good faith and dedication. And that’s a particularly interesting thing to consider in regards to Ghosted, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s novel about the redemption of drug-addicted-drifter-cum-aspiring-writer Mason Dubisee.
For the first 150 pages I found Mason mostly intolerable. His days are fuelled by coke and alcohol, though all he really gets around to is losing at poker and selling the occasional hot dog. He claims to be a writer, but barely writes. At first I wondered if I just couldn’t relate because I was too coddled suburban middle class, or because it was a guy book (a category I am hesitant to assign to anything), but ultimately I decided that not only did I find the character unrelatable, but more importantly, uninteresting, which is a unfortunate combination in fiction. There’s nothing wrong with a good anti-hero: I didn’t find Humbert Humbert particularly relatable, for example, but he had my undivided attention after only a handful of lines. In short, I wasn’t [...]
|
|
