On the night table: Tanis MacDonald

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/07/2016 (3612 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Poet and professor (Wilfrid Laurier University)

I am reading Mary Soderstrom’s absorbing book about being an urban pedestrian, The Walkable City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs’ Streets and Beyond. It’s loaded with cool historical information about cities I love, and is the next best thing to being in Paris or New York.

I am savouring Jeanette Lynes’ Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare Poems. Clare was a slightly shadowy 19th-century poet whose encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world made him a suspicious figure to the Victorians, and he was eventually confined to an asylum. Lynes is a brilliant vocal stylist, and the book is funny and tragic and crammed full of botanical facts.

Finally, I just finished Rene Denfield’s searing The Enchanted, a prison novel split between the perspectives of an inmate and a death-row legal advocate: unforgettable.