Magnificent Octopus

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits onesel...

Being mom to a 7-year-old means I get exposed to a lot of crazy TV. We've come to love iCarly. The show is fun and dynamic. It doesn...

I'd picked up The Invention of Morel , by Adolfo Bioy Casares, some time ago, along with a few other New York Review Books classics , wh...

J-F had asked me to pack playing cards, and, well, I forgot. On some level I was thinking, "Why would we need cards on vacation in Cuba...

I finished Sputnik Sweetheart , and I greatly enjoyed it. But at about the halfway mark, I started periodically checking the back cover, thi...

This book — Hashish, Wine, Opium — is one of the weirdest, sublimest little gems I've ever had the pleasure to stumble upon. It's f...

Prompted no doubt by Kim's post on excuses for buying books, I woke up today itching to buy a book, and no good reason at hand. So what...

I must be a philistine. I didn't love Ian McEwan's Atonement . And I feel terrible about it. This is the fourth McEwan book I've...

I love-love-loved Haruki Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle , but I'm hard put to tell you why, beyond that it was so completely the ...

We return rested, warmed and sun-kissed. I was surprised to discover that my two main choices in reading material shared the exact same colo...

It was -8°C in Montreal yesterday, with a windchill factor making it feel like -16°C. Today was bone-chillingly damp. In Varadero tomorrow, ...

Hans gets an x-ray! And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he...

Oh no! Hans bought a thermometer! Pretty much just a page after where I'd last left off . Not much secret what the rest of the book will...

Ultimately, there is something odd about settling in somewhere new — about the perhaps laborious process of getting used to new surroundings...

I need a vacation. Sure I had a Christmas break, but 7 days in a small house with family members I see only a few times a year ends up being...

"It all seems rather cold." "Cold?" For once von Abt appeared lost for words. "Cold! All my work, all my art is bas...

I think I bought the wrong calendar. I mean, it's 2010, so it'll work, but I put it up on the wall before going to bed last night, a...

The epigraph that starts off Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron , by Jasper Fforde , is taken from Alfred North Whitehead and sets up ...

Today the metro is surprisingly spare. Everyone gets a seat. Revelling in the luxury of space, some people are resistant to moving their bag...

... is her two maxillary lateral incisors. She lost one before breakfast, due to the force of her tongue and talking too much. It'd bee...