If you’re looking for a book to mark Remembrance Day, I recommend Coventry, by Helen Humphreys.  It’s a fairly short novel about two women in the British city of Coventry and what happens to them and their loved ones during both World Wars.

Much of it takes place on the night in 1940 when Coventry sustained its worst bombing.  It gave me some sense of what it was like for civilians to live through such an attack.

A new British play, That Face, is on at the Berkeley Street Theatre until Nov. 21.  The playwright, Polly Stenham, was only twenty when the play premiered in London in 2007. Here’s an interesting Globe and Mail interview with the playwright.

If you’d like to read the play, we have it at Laidlaw Library.

This summer the American Psychological Association published the sixth edition of its popular Publication Manual, and it turns out to full of errors –  pretty shocking for a book which tells you how to get all the details and punctuation right when you’re compiling a bibliography.

After receiving a lot of criticism, the APA is doing a revised Second Printing and has apparently now agreed to give buyers of the error-ridden First Printing a replacement copy, starting Nov. 2.  (I will get a replacement for Laidlaw Library’s copy.)

In case you’re curious, the APA has posted a list of the the errors identified in the first printing.

The winner of this year’s Toronto Book Award is More, Austin Clarke’s novel about a single mother faced with the news that her son is involved in gang crime.

The Toronto Book Awards honours books that are “evocative of Toronto.”  The other finalists this year were Anthony De Sa’s novel Barnacle Love, Maggie Helwig’s novel Girls Fall Down, and two non-fiction books: Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been, and In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger’s Memoir.

Here are my favourites among the books I read this summer.  They would be good in any season, and all are available at Laidlaw Library.

Run, by Ann Patchett
A riveting family story set in Boston in the winter.  Except for a prologue and epilogue, it all takes place in one 24-hour period.

The Prairie Bridesmaid, by Daria Salamon
It feels like “chick lit” (first-person narrator with a group of women friends, self-deprecating humour, a focus on relationships).  But whereas a lot of chick lit seems to be about how a woman finds the man of her dreams, this book is about how a woman extricates herself from an emotionally abusive relationship with the man of her dreams.

Olive Kittredge, by Elizabeth Strout
Sad, memorable stories about different characters who all live in the same small town in Maine (I read it while I was in Maine). Olive Kitteridge is a difficult woman who appears in all the stories, sometimes as a central character, sometimes not. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.

I really enjoyed Eleanor Wachtel’s June 21st interview with Aravind Adiga on Writers & Company.  Well, I always enjoy Writers & Company (not a big surprise, coming from a librarian), but this one was especially interesting.  Adiga is the author of The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Booker Prize.

For the most part Laidlaw Library does not lend books during the summer because the library is closed. But there are two exceptions:

1. University College faculty & appointed staff: You are welcome to borrow any of our books during the summer. Just e-mail or call us with your request, and we will check the book(s) out to you and deliver them to your UC mailbox or UC office, usually within a couple of days.
2. Other borrowers: Although we are closed, if there’s a book you need and we have the only available library copy on the St. George campus, please e-mail us or call, as we may be able to make a special exception and lend the book to you at a mutually convenient time.

We have a book return box just outside the library doors.

Today the Hot Docs audience award winner (and nine runners-up) were announced. My own favourite among the films I saw at Hot Docs this year was The Experimental Eskimos, about three Inuit men who as 12-year-old boys in the ’60s were sent away from their families and community to school in Ottawa, as part of a secret “experiment” by the federal government.

In honour of Lit City (which “celebrates writers who find inspiration in Toronto and use the city as a setting in their work”), I’m reading Dionne Brand’s powerful novel What we all long for.  It touches on so many Toronto places and so many sides of life in Toronto.