In my experience, the cluster of days between one year’s end and another’s beginning are ripe with reflection. I can’t stop myself from cataloguing losses, gains, and lessons learned before drafting a new chapter. I wonder if this is common for others who also read as many coming of age novels as I did during... Read More

Books Like Us

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong

Dystopian YA fiction brings readers into settings that feel simultaneously distant and close. The adolescent characters in this genre fight for their lives and the lives of their loved ones under authoritarian systems, violent oppressors, and villains intent on destruction. These thematic threads of survival and persistence appeal to readers of all ages, particularly when... Read More

The Marrow Thieves – Cherie Dimaline

When the temperature and timing are right, some reading experiences can feel like fever dreams; narrative immersions that keep you up late into the night and transport you across oceans and decades. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels – My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of  a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay... Read More

The Neapolitan Novels – Elena Ferrante

Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of self-harm, violence, abuse, and suicide. As a reader who occasionally enjoys judging books by their covers, I remember the curiosity I felt looking at Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) for the first time. Our 35th reader was also transfixed by the cover subject’s expression of both pleasure... Read More

A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

“People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?” For over a century, the red-haired heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne (“with an e”) Shirley, has stolen the hearts of readers across Canada... Read More

Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maud Montgomery

What kind of spring is this, / Where there are no flowers and / The air is filled with a miserable smell? – Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost The above poem was etched into a styrofoam cup and passed between detainees in the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention camp. It is included alongside twenty-one other poems in... Read More

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak – Edited by Mark Falkoff

It is a truth universally acknowledged that we often judge books by their cover. In the case of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), soothing blues and turquoises promise levity and peacefulness, both desirable states of being in a frantically disordered world. The KonMari method... Read More

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo

If you ask a PhD candidate studying English literature to name a book that had a profound impact on her life, chances are you’ll receive an impressive list as a response. Our thirty-first reader’s selections included Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, everything written by Carson McCullers, and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine.... Read More

The Argonauts – Maggie Nelson

Who am I? Why I am here? Why did it take me so long to get this thirtieth episode up and running? What is the self? What is human consciousness? Are we a perpetually perplexed species? In this episode we dive headfirst into questions of human existence and consciousness with a return guest and the... Read More

I Am a Strange Loop – Douglas Hofstadter

Content Warning: Please be advised that this episode features discussions of sexual assault, rape culture, victim blaming, and uses language that some may find triggering. Now is the time for difficult conversations. We need to listen to voices that have long been silenced and challenge those who promote fear among vulnerable populations. This is particularly... Read More

Asking for It – Louise O’Neill

When summer finally arrives in Canada, people walk around cities and towns in a daze. It’s as if we’ve all woken up on another planet and are trying to remember long-forgotten survival skills. Once the shock wears off, people flood onto patios and into parks to pay homage to the sun and to melt the... Read More

This One Summer – Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

I have always been an avid reader. As a child I devoured pretty much any book I could get my sticky little hands on, showing very little discretion regarding genre or subject. That lack of preference faded the day I encountered the work of Roald Dahl. To say I was obsessed with Dahl would be an... Read More

Matilda – Roald Dahl

Grab your best walking stick, find a supply of lembas bread, brush up on your Elvish dialects, and join me on a journey through Middle-earth with our twenty-sixth reader. After decades of composition and revision, The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) between July... Read More

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Six readers. Six major novels. Six insightful conversations. This is the second installment in a two-part series on Jane Austen and her work. Austen has played a formative role in my personal reading history since the day I selected Pride and Prejudice for a sixth grade book report. I’ve often relied upon Austen’s novels for... Read More

Jane Austen Panel – Part Two

Six readers. Six major novels. Six insightful conversations. This is the first installment in a two-part series on Jane Austen and her work. Austen has played a formative role in my personal reading history since the day I selected Pride and Prejudice for a sixth grade book report. I’ve often relied upon Austen’s novels for... Read More

Jane Austen Panel – Part One

Conversations about the books that move us, shake us, and shape us.

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Books Like Us

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