Welcome to 2011, everyone! I hope you've had a great New Year's and Christmas holiday and are settling back into the regular routines of your week.
As I mentioned in my last post, there are going to be a few changes to Bloomingwriter in the coming weeks, especially as the end of this month will mark 5 years of me bathering on here. One of the changes I have been sort-of implementing of late is the publishing of book reviews and author interviews. Although these will mostly be of books pertaining to gardening, botany, and such, I also plan to drop in the occasional review of a favourite fiction book, and a talk with its author.
CBC Radio has a program on each winter called Canada Reads, where five 'celebrity judges' debate the merits of five recent works of Canadian fiction. The show will run in early February, but there's been a lot of hype and chatter in recent weeks and days. This year marks ten years of the show, and the books were selected from works published in the past ten years. To my great delight, one of the books in the top five is The Birth House, by Scotts Bay resident Ami McKay! This is one of my favourite novels of all time, and not just because it's by a writer who is a friend and is set in my community. It simply reads like a dream. Chapters/Indigo included it as one of their best books of the decade, and it's been published in numerous other countries, including the USA, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.
