In Review: The Week of August 20th

On the Blog

~ Inspired by World Photography Day, our list of snap-worthy stories was ready for its closeup.~ Don’t tell us it isn’t completely normal to have crushes on literary characters because our summer flings say otherwise.~ We wrapped up summer book club with four post-Figg books to ease our farewell blues.~ Our arm-chair travels took us to the Emma Lake artist workshop which was suspended in 2016 with Atomic Road (Anvil Press).~ Debut author Abla Farhoud shows the gritty, but no less remarkable side of Montreal in her novel Hutchison Street (Linda Leith Publishing).

Around the Web

~ An American study concludes unsurprisingly that a third of teens in the US have replaced traditional reading for social media, or in other words: get the kids to the library, stat. 

via GIPHY

~ But there’s hope yet: The New York Public Library encourages novel ways of reading by turning classic public-domain novels into Instagram stories.~ Even more heartening news: CanCon is thriving at home with the growing popularity of audiobooks. 

What Else We’re Reading

Staffer Mandy is on Catherine Fatima’s auto-fictional journey in Sludge Utopia (Book*hug), a raw, emotionally engaging story of a young woman trying to discover meaning through desire and her place within society’s definition of love. With chapters titled Stimulation, Depression, Utopia, Family, Love, Sludge, Sludge Utopia is a wild exploratory ride of sex, love, power relations, and internalized misogyny.