I love books. Some might even say I’m obsessed with them. I have a modest collection of my own, but mostly I borrow from the library and collect ebook review copies. I run a book blog with about a dozen other reviewers, and I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I was a bookseller for ten years, then an English teacher and aspiring school librarian, and now an editor for a bookish website. I procrastinate by scrolling BookTok and any given conversation will lead back to the literary. My life is built on a foundation of books. But reading? Mm…I could take it or leave it.
The relatively recent creation of this bone suggests that counting is a late-blooming skill, not an inevitable result of intelligence. The brain inside your head is largely the same as the one inside the skull of the first Homo sapiens, and it seems that for most of our species’ history, this wise man did not bother with numbers at all.
Once we did get to grips with numbers, however, the advantage was clear. This is why you probably don’t even remember learning to count. Counting is such a valued skill in most human cultures that you would have started before you began to lay down permanent memories.
Some places are offering regional flavors, or creative takes on heritage dishes; others feature a tasting menu or an extensive wine list. They are meeting the tastes of a suburban population that, in part because of the pandemic, is not only growing but also diversifying. The stereotype of the suburbs as homogeneous, white-picket-fence communities is long outdated, and as people move there from cities, they are bringing their appetite for more sophisticated, varied menus.
As Vancouver officials scrambled to decide the fate of the nearly 200-foot, brick-red barge in the days and weeks that followed, passers-by gravitated to the surreal sight. Clusters of people stopped and marveled. They took selfies and went live on Facebook. Like many art installations, the barge in Canada’s third largest city piqued curiosity, sparked questions and drew comparisons.
Here is a character who is vulnerable but not entirely sympathetic, or trustworthy; a woman desperate for transformation, but also one who fears if she looks too hard at herself, she would be like “a bay stripped bare by the tides, all the scum and rocks…on hideous display.” It’s a mesmerizing portrayal, inviting understanding while flashing warnings not to get too close.
Isolated and fatigued by the pandemic over the last two years, existential questions have consumed many of our minds. What is the meaning of our lives? How should we be spending our time?
Poets are great at ruminating on these questions, and Bianca Stone is one of them.
Many of the poems in Air Raid perform acts of poetic reanimation, lending the letters of famine victims and forgotten authors the kind of verve and lushness that are Barskova’s signature. These poems cast a canny and often self-ironizing eye on her own endeavor: “Dead poets love me back,” she quips in “Mutabor.” And yet, their playfulness is undergirded with a sense of mission: to amplify the voices of those whom history has reduced to statistics. The feelings occasioned by this historical position are not simple, and Barskova’s writing does not avoid, but indeed revels in, their messiness.
Clementine Ford is a force to be reckoned with: a feminist provocateuse whose humour is almost as powerful as her integrity. Her third book, How We Love, is a collection of personal essays showing how a girl became a woman, and demonstrating the self-compassion we all need to show our younger selves.
I visit sites of historic knowledge. Trees layer
their ecological light onto my human form.