In Review: The Week of July 9th

On the Blog

~ All Lit Up Book Club continued on with our staff discussion of Paige Cooper’s Zolitude (Biblioasis): we even rounded up some discussion questions for your own club and recorded our discussion for your listening…pleasure? Listening something.~ We said a sad farewell to our colleague Julia of Jules’ Tools for Social Change fame – she’s leaving for a new position – but not before she gave us her “fave five” books that she read and discussed on the job.~ Our #FridayReads pick was Catherine Fatima’s Sludge Utopia (Book*hug), an auto-fictional novel of a woman trying to ascribe meaning to sexual desire in decidedly meaningless times.~ Love video games? Whether you’re an FPS maverick or love a quiet, contemplative interactive story, this week’s xy .~ Our Top 10 this week was all about novels that feature real people: celebrities, family members, and randos, all!

Around the Web

~ The Golden Booker, a vote-determined prize of the best Booker winner of the past fifty years, went to a Canadian: The English Patient.~ Speaking of things with British origins, why not check out this literary map of the United Kingdom, to see where some famed book settings lie across the pond?~ Praise be: the company responsible for the ill-advised Handmaid’s Tale tie-in wines has pulled the project after (understandable) social media backlash.

What Else We’re Reading

If you just finished Heather O’Neill’s whimsical-yet-gritty The Lonely Hearts Hotel set in jazz-age Montreal, why not follow it up with Saleema Newaz’s Mother Superior (Freehand Books), a collection of stories in contemporary Montreal that lose none of the wonder and underbelly ways of O’Neill’s novel.