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 [...]
By Sarah, on January 15th, 2010 Reading The Carnivore was an interesting experience for me, because I’ve never been so engrossed in a story centered on characters I couldn’t stand. Both of the protagonists teetered on the border of unbearable, and perhaps it was because I anxiously wanted to see what abyss they’d sink into next, but I just couldn’t get enough. Like the undertow of the flooding rivers the pages describe, each time I turned a page I was sucked further in.
This is the story of a failed marriage, a husband and wife narrating alternating chapters of reflection on their troubled past. It is a story of a shared memory lacking the capacity to heal, existing only as the point of regeneration for a lifelong downward spiral. This fictional trip through the past takes place on the backdrop of the very real Hurricane Hazel, one of the deadliest storms to ever hit southern Ontario. The metaphor of the storm tracks perfectly the course of Ray and Mary’s union; like the citizens of Toronto preparing for the floods, they didn’t know exactly what to expect, were hit with innumerable horrors but somehow managed to survive and, when it passed, felt nothing but relief.
Interestingly, Hurricane Hazel had [...]
By JK, on December 29th, 2009 I had never read a graphic novel until I picked up Skim, but I was definitely interested in doing so. I initially started with The Watchmen, which I found terribly hard to follow (the boyfriend informed me after this first futile foray that it is a particularly difficult graphic novel). Having come across some of Mariko’s writing recently and having been completely sucked in by it reminded me of the highly-praised Skim, so I decided to give it a try.
I’m happy to say it was much easier than The Watchmen. Part of it was that it was slipping back into a familiar (if equally dark and perilous environment) — high school. I may not have been a Goth or an budding Wiccan, but the Tamakis have tapped in to something most people felt in high school — different, baffled, and often alone. The cast that Skim wears from the page one until near the conclusion is a perfect metaphor for those difficult years — we’re fragile, reforming on the inside, protected by a hard shell we are always trying to refashion to signify what we would like to be within.
In Skim, the Toronto high school has been shaken by the [...]
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