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 [...]
This Saturday I rose earlier than for work hours (!!!) and gritted my teeth for a weekend dose of the TTC for good reason: BookCampTO. What’s a BookCamp? Basically it’s an excuse for people involved in the book industry to leave our computers at home (and show off our iPads and iPhones) and gather to match names to twitter handles, faces to facebooks, and discuss the future of the publishing industry and the book itself. Sessions are fairly free-form and covered a wide range of topics all related to books in the hopes of sharing experiences, solving problems and speculating on the future.
Here’s a few notes from the sessions I attended:
9:30 Launching a Digital Business from Inside a Print Business (Sulemaan Ahmed & Jenny Bullough, Harlequin)
The focus of this session was, as the title indicates, about launching your digital business. The talk was well-attended because most people know that Harlequin’s worth listening to on all things digital, but it seems that the presenters should have picked a topic that was a little more advanced. Most people in the room already HAD a digital business, and something more focused on promotion, sales, distribution etc. of that title would likely [...]
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