Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Guardian: Is reading on the loo bad for you? Microbes don’t fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it’s likely bugs can live on those for hours. Working in a library, handling all those recently returned books, you try not to think about this sort of thing too often. Finally, Shaoul concluded that reading on … Continue reading →

I don’t know how to measure love. There’s no way to quantify how I feel about you. There is no ruler to measure your beauty, no scales to weigh how my life has changed. An atomic clock can’t describe the times we’ve shared, some pencil marks on the wall will never show how we’ve grown together. Our relationship can’t be defined by numbers. But there are a few that might help: 2 homelands. 8 homes. 5 universities. 1 great dane. … Continue reading →

From William Steig’s Caldecott Award acceptance speech, 1970: Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. I have nothing to add. Read … Continue reading →

Over the last few years I have made several attempts at NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The basic idea is that you sign up and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. This equates to 1,667 words per day. Every day. For the whole month. I have never managed this. My best effort was 2 years ago when I wrote 16,000 words of a children’s story. Obviously this is nowhere near the target, but … Continue reading →

Fourteen years ago today I stood nervously at the front of Faith Baptist Church in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. This may come as a shock to those who have only come to know me since then, but I was sporting a reasonably full head of hair. Beside me stood my brother who had flown from Australia to be part of the day. This may come as a shock to those who have only come to know him since then, but he was sporting a pony … Continue reading →

Cross posted over at aboutthebooks.blogspot.com: Picture an alternate Europe just before World War I. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies have at their disposal a range of Clankers – steam powered walking machines of various shapes and sizes. Heavily armoured against attacks and mounted with machine guns and canons. On the other side are the British Darwinists. They have learned to engineer and fabricate animals to create their weaponry. Featured heavily in this book is the Leviathan, a airship that is … Continue reading →