Author: August

#67 – Entitlement, by Jonathan Bennett

August Leave a Comment

I don’t norally say things like this, but I think it’s an entirely apt assessment, and I couldn’t get it out of my head the whole time I was reading this. Entitlement is Dirty Sexy Money meets A Separate Peace. For those not in the know (and judging by that fact that it’s being canceled—yet another little pleasure I’ll have to let go of—not many of you are), Dirty Sexy Money is about how lawyer Nick George’s adult life is turned upside down as he takes responsibility for cleaning up the various messes made by the Darling family, the inconceivably wealthy family he was close to when growing up. A Separate Peace is of course the vaguely homo-erotic novel about coming of age at a private school that everyone who went to public school in Ontario was made to read in high school in the 1990s. Entitlement is more or… Continue Reading →

The Long Read: The Anatomy of Melancholy

August Leave a Comment

I’m inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It’s called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I’ve wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren’t many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don’t fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I’m talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations… Continue Reading →

Comments Are Fixed

August Leave a Comment

The problem with the comments has been fixed. Because I’m quick like that. If you’ve previously visited individual entry pages on vestige.org, it would be a could idea to do a refresh before you write your comments, as the problem was with a faulty template, the data for which might still be in your cache (and for some reason still affects the comments—wonders never cease).

Comments Problem

August 1 Comment

It has come to my attention that there is yet another problem with the commenting system (MovableType seems to fail more or less at random, after working properly without issue for months or years at a stretch), and every single comment is now appearing on this entry, no matter what entry the poster actually intended to comment on. I won’t have time until later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, but I hope to have it corrected quickly.

Things I Remember

August Leave a Comment

I’ve been re-reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen this weekend, in anticpation of Zack Snyder’s upcoming film (warning: link re-sizes your browser). Ironically, the sense of nostalgia the work tries to elicit—for the supposedly more innocent comics (and times) of the 1940s and 1950s—is not the nostalgia I experience. I’m simply too young. I instead experience a nostalgia for the period when Watchmen takes place, 1985. The fear of nuclear annihilation was never something I felt palpably. I was thankfully too young for that as well. I could sense the fear, and sometimes the outright paranoia, in the world and some of the people around me. That paranoia dribbles and oozes through the the pages of Watchmen, coating the characters and distorting everything. There is so little hope in this book, and so much despair. How sad is it that these are my “simpler times”? In the book we… Continue Reading →

#66 – At A Loss For Words, by Diane Schoemperlen

August Leave a Comment

I had expected this book to take me only a day or so to read; after all it’s not only quite short, it’s written by one of my favourite authors. It took me more than two weeks to read. Usually taking so long with a book means either that it is extremely long, or it has trouble holding my interest. Neither was the case with At A Loss For Words. Instead I found that I was so emotionally invested in the material that I found it virtually impossible to stay with the book for any length of time. If you shortened the time frame and switched the pronouns around, the plot—a writer, suffering from writer’s block, is reunited with a lost love for an intense long-distance romance, only to be callously abandoned by him a second time, with traumatic consequences—would be a pretty accurate description of the last twelve months… Continue Reading →

Email Problems

August Leave a Comment

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have A Policy

August Leave a Comment

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It’s kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I’ll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you’d like me to review, get the skinny here. I’d love to hear from you.

It’s Not My Place to Say

August Leave a Comment

A few words for my American readers on this momentous day: I’m not an American citizen (I don’t live there, in fact I haven’t even visited for something like sixteen years), so it’s not really my place to tell you what election day is all about in your country. I would not be making this statement at all if I did not believe the outcome of the election mattered to you, or indeed to me. In a free and democratic society, voting for your leadership is not only a right, it’s a responsibility (an opinion I’ve expressed before). What you do today will have an effect on you, your loved ones, your community, and even those of us in other nations. I won’t pretend that I don’t have an opinion about who would be the best choice, both for your nation and mine (ahem), but I’ll ask only these two… Continue Reading →