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I hated Eleanor Rigby. I think his work has really declined. Microserfs is imho his best, followed by Girlfriend in a Coma. The rest, I could take or leave.

use an mp3 flash drive that is 1 gb and I love it. I can just plug and play and I don't need to use special software like you do with an ipod. Also I can change the battery using regular batteries any time I need to, I don't have to charge it specially. Plus it bugs me that itunes uses its own...

I agree, I read the first one (when I spent the year living in NZ and all the kids were reading it) and it was okay, but it did not inspire me to seek out the others.

I have been living in New Zealand for the past year and it has made me quite nostalgic for Canada. But I am sure that within five minutes of being back in Canada, I will be gushing sentimentally about New Zealand. I am not a born traveller. I enjoy it, but in limited doses. NZ has been a little...

Anne-Marie McDonald is excellent. If you are going for Coupland, I would recommend only his earlier ones. His latest book was imho terrible. I enjoyed Microserfs a lot, and Girlfriend in a Coma is pretty good too (and set in Vancouver). Wayson Choy only has the one novel, I think, but he is...

I am student teaching right now and was quite excited to learn that the teacher did regular "classic reading" with the kids. She explained to me that in addition to their free choice personal reading, they do additional silent reading from a library of classics she provides for the classroom. It...

Stewart, my only point was that good match IS important. Obviously, this teacher was not a good fit for me and that affected my experience. That does not mean she had nothing to teach me, or that I was a terrible writer. It just meant that our interests did not click. I was not capable...

I think it is very hard to talk in absolutes and I hate blanket generalizations about things. Books can be very mind-opening, or they can be an excuse or babysitter just as much as TV can. I remember my Mom's talk to me about sex when I was about 9 consisting of "Here is a book, and if you have...

I didn't take a graduate program, but I took a creative option for a semester during journalism school. It was a mistake for me. I think it is important to have a good fit with the teacher for something like this. Basically, this teacher was a Genre Snob. She felt that literary fiction was the...

I would hope this would not be an issue for the coming generation because I really don't think anything has "changed" per se. To me, speaking as a primary school teacher :) the basic message is still the same: you write for an audience and the requirements of your writing will differ depending...

I have not been able to get into Mrs. Dalloway yet, but Michael Cunnignham's The Hours, which uses Mrs. Dalloway as a central theme, is a beautiful book and I just loved the movie. One of my top 5 movies of all time, and the book was pretty decent too.

The early ones are better. The last two were written in a totally different style (e.g. in present tense "literary" rather than the omniscient third person of the earlier books) and just were terrible. It is not a writing style that works for these sorts of books. It lacked a lot of the emotion...

Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennitt is known for her recordings of famaous poems. She has done The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes, The Lady of Shalott by Tennyson, Prospero's Speech by William Shakespeare, The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and possibly one or two others. They...

I read a lot of classics and have been posting about them, and I am a proper adult :)

It can be a good career, but imho you really need to be able to handle the lifestyle of a contract worker. There are few good writing and editing jobs that are not contracts. I found that when I was working in journalism, I did just fine with the writing and editing part but just could not...

This will be my fourth nano. The first year, I finished but sort of cheated a little and the book was terrible. The second year I burned out at the 40-page mark following a really difficult technical chapter about robots. Last year I finished and have a story I am quite happy with and hoping to...

Peter David wrote a highly regarded (for that sort of thing) Star Trek novel in which he named all the alien villain characters after parts of the Jewish seder plate, which is the centerpiece of the Passover meal. I am sure his non-Jewish readers thought Maror, Betzah, Zroah and Carpas were just...

Thanks Zolipara, I was able to find all of these books and will read them. I have so many Gutenberg texts on my TBR list right now! I will be happily supplied for some time. There is some good stuff out there. There is a ton of early 20th century mystery available, has anyone read Buchan...

I do have such a Sherlock Holmes book, but it is in storage in Toronto and I am finishing grad school in New Zealand right now, so one takes what one can get :) My trusty Clie handheld is showing its age unfortunately, and it resents every time I change the batteries, which is kind of a pain...

Life Strategies by Dr. Phil is pretty good.