Death at the Sign of the Rook
by Kate Atkinson. Anchor 2025 3.5 stars - August 2026
Not a bad murder mystery; I liked that it had a bit of a self-reflexive thing about it: self-consciously trading in the stereotypical genre tropes (class friction, retrograde sexuality, strong echoes) while winking a bit. It’s a pretty enjoyable read. That said, a couple weeks after reading it I can remember little about what went on.
…two by John Stilgoe
Landscape (MIT Press 2015)
Outside Lies Magic (MIT Press 1998)
4 stars - July/Aug 2026
I re-read Landscape (originally reviewed in 2018) and got vastly more out of it this time. It is truly a book of etymology; or perhaps a book of cultural critique, with etymology as its method; or perhaps we should just call this philology beyond the text. In any case, Stilgoe’s erudition is just off the charts. His interest – curiosity – about the roots of the words and the ideas that make up his professional view (he is Professor of Landscape History at Harvard) is so rich, and so his storytelling (weird and convoluted like an ancient sage) is truly compelling. There is a lot of politics in this book, but you have to read carefully to see where he’s coming from. This is a book that a casual reader (like me in 2018) just bounces off. It demands care and patience. Then, by way of the old “lattice of coincidence,” I found Stilgoe’s 1998 book, Outside Lies Magic, in my local Little Free Library. This is much lighter on the etymological tales, and more about the rewards of careful observation of the built environment and infrastructure of modern America. He takes the reader on a tale around the suburban and rural everyday – roadways, highways, streets, motels – pointing out the stories and explanations that come from close observation of the things we normally choose not to pay attention to. This is a much more playful book than Landscape, more accessible, but still with its political edge.
Strange Heaven
by Lynn Coady. Anchor 2002
4 stars. July 2026
A dark dark comedy set in Nova Scotia; a your girl gets pregnant and then gives her baby up for adoption; she is judged ‘apathetic’ and stuck in the psych ward in the Children’s hospital. The story is her coming off the ward and re-integrating with her Cape Breton family and hometown, which are completely insane.
Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples
by Francis Young. Cambridge 2026
3.5 stars. July 2026
I read about this in the LRB this spring, and then I actually went to Lithuania, which is a prominent part of the story here, taking hundreds of years to be ‘fully’ christianized. Reader, I must confess I doubt that ‘fully’ very much… the place has more churches than you can count, but the old traditions are still pretty visible if you know what to look for (having for instance read this book). It’s a fascinating story, with late medieval and early modern Christian expansion pretty tangled up in colonial land-grabs, even in northern Europe. The Lithuanians, for instance, were fed up with that, and made alliances in order to kick the Teutonic Knights to the curb in the 14th century. My complaint with this book is that it is a huge-scale survey of European christianization, proceeding roughly chronologically rather than focusing on the stories of individual locales – the latter would have made a more readable book, I think.
Riverwork
by Lisa Robertson. Coach House Books 2026
5 stars. June 2026
I love Lisa Robertson, love everything she’s written; if you read these reviews you will find five stars littered here and there next to her name. This one I considered giving five and a half. This is her greatest work yet. I paused midway throught to write to the publisher and congratulate them on this book. Riverwork is everything we love about LR: the densely layered prose poetry, the rich intertextuality with everything French and Romantic as well as with her own keywords and literary ley lines (newcomers to LR may not have as easy a time as those familiar with her work), the wholly indirect diaphanous narration that occupies multiple perspectives and timeframes, and the surprising candour and abjectness of her revelations… though, Marcel-like, her revelations are always sedimented in fictional characters. I had to pause every couple of pages to let all the references land, to catch my breath, and then to proceed.
…two books by Julian Barnes
The Porcupine (Random House 1992)
The Only Story (Random House 2018)
3.5 stars - May 2026
Many years ago I read something Julian Barnes (probably History of the World…) and formed an opinion of him as a great writer; he later won the Booker Prize, and is I think widely celebrated as a a great writer. So when I recently stumbled – twice – on books by Barnes in our own collection (yes it is that large and that disorganized), I thought I’d dive in. The Porcupine is the story of a lawyer-prosecutor charged with charging the former communist dictator of a former Soviet satellite state with crimes that would publicly toss him on the proverbial ash-heap of history. Only it doesn’t work out quite like that: circumstances are complex, stories are tangled, and our supposed hero scores a pyrrhic victory at considerable cost. The Only Story is, on the other hand, a love story, about a young man who falls deeply for a middle-aged married woman, not realizing what a mess he’s gotten himself into until he’s in way too deep… and the fallout of this entanglement that affects the whole rest of his life. Both books are good reads: interesting, layered, stylishly written. But I found both unsatisfying in that novelly way: they set things up, they come to an ending, but somehow I’m left feeling like I went on a short ride, when I think what I want from a book is to be transported. Neither of these transported me; both left me thinking about what was wrong with them afterward: unconvincing characters, oversimplified contexts, and the mystery of why Barnes chose to write these particular stories anyway.
Reconciling: A Lifelong Struggle to Belong
by Larry Grant with Scott Steedman. ECW Press 2025
4.5 stars - April 2026
I’ve met Elder Larry Grant from Musqueam a number of times, and heard his stories, and I am forever a fan; my colleague Scott Steedman’s rendering of almost a decade’s worth of conversations with Larry into a book is a serious treasure. The stories cover Larry’s incredible life: born to a Chinese father and Musqueam mother in a time when both groups were seriously marginalized in Canada; his loss of Indigenous status when the Indian Agent denied this because his father was Chinese, which led to Larry not being sent to Residential School in Mission like all his cousins and neighbours; his interesting path through life; and finally his transformation into a sought-after language authority, storyteller, professor, and public personality.
The Whispering Muse
by Sjon. FSG 2012
3.5 stars - April 2026
An intriguing little book in which the tales of the Argonauts, Sigurd and Gudrun, and a contemporary ship’s voyage are layered upon one another via story-within-a-story. The whole thing is vaguely satisfying, vaguely unsettling.
The Samurai
by Julia Kristeva. Columbia UP 1992
3.5 stars - Jan 2026
Julia Kristeva, possibly the greatest star of the second generation of French superstar academics of the late-20th century, also wrote novels; this was her first. It is in large part autobiographical, tracing her own career from her arrival in Paris in the mid-1960s through her later intercontinental academic fame. Frankly it’s a bit of a dodgy novel; the latter half of it feels really self-indulgent and trite. But the first half is pretty entertaining. She arrives in Paris with an invitation and a stipend to be a grad student, and she quickly immerses herself in the wild and wacky world of 60s Parisian structuralism, gravitating to Roland Barthes, whose star was particularly ascendant at that time. She traces those early years and the lead-up to the May '68 events, with loads of famous people barely disguised by pseudonym (Jacques Lacan is “Lauzon”; Barthes is “Bréhal”; Levi-Strauss is “Strich-Meyer”; there are a dozen more) and it’s all pretty funny. I don’t know if she intended it to be funny, writing in (probably) the late 80s, but it reads as funny now. The best bit is the chapter where she and the delegation from the avant-garde journal Tel Quel (disguised as “Maintenant”) travel to China in the early 70s because they’re all so keen on Maoism; the results are pure farce. But later chapters involve her dalliance with fabulous men in New York City, and then ultimately she has a child and everything makes a new kind of sense for her (really, Julia Kristeva?). So, overall: disappointing, but the first half is quite fun.
Mary Queen of Scots
by John Guy. Mariner Books 2005
5 stars - Jan 2026
What an epic story, rivaling just about any adventure/fantasy book I’ve ever read. Mary’s story is just insane, shot through the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the reign of Elizabeth I. And, as I’ve noted before, anyone (like me) tempted to proudly trace their Scottish heritage should give their head a shake: these were absolutely awful people! John Guy’s 2004 opus is based on substantial and apparently new archival research, and so it supposedly sheds new light on this much-debated tale of heroism, character, history, and tragedy. Guy is able to present her as a pretty sympathetic character, and once we get through her plucky early life and root for her brilliance and charisma, Mary’s extended downfall makes for tough reading – emotionally, I mean; the book remains a total page-turner all the way through its 500 pages. I laughed, I cried; mostly I cried.