Somewhat more put-downable is Canadian Literary Power by Frank Davey (NeWest Press), which took me a week to read. This is a book filled with Serious Thinking, so of course it’s slow, and I’m still not sure how much of it I can agree with.

Stephen Scobie’s Gospel, A Poem had the invigorating effect of making me want to read poetry again: the book is a beautiful object and not at all precious, and the poetry, a visitation of the Gospels, is simply wonderful. You want to read it out loud from the first line, and then you want to keep it nearby so that you can get to know it well.

My dog-eared copy of Juxtsuppose, a zine “conceived and coordinated by Billy Rueben and Brad Y” (available at Box 30007 Parkgate, N. Vancouver V7H 2Y8) represents the best two bucks I’ve spent all year.

Often I have yearned to go to Newfoundland, as part of an eastward reversal of the migration of the sixties. I felt that yearning again when I read Extremities, a collection of short fiction by the ten Newfoundland writers who make up the Burning Rock writing collective (Killick Press).

P.D. James meets Philip K. Dick in Barbara Ehrenreich’s first novel, Kipper’s Game, a complex mystery story set in an all-too-believable world of strange new diseases, genetic mutations and virtual reality.

If you read one book on the Information Age, make sure it’s Bill McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information (Penguin/Plume), which is a real page-turner of a long essay about What’s Wrong with the Idea of Information. The device is neat: McKibben watched twenty-four hours’ worth of TV in Fairfax, Virginia (it took him a year—you can get ninety-three channels in Fairfax), and then he spent twenty-four hours alone up one of the Adirondack mountains, recovering.

I wasn’t at all cheered up by On the Edge: A Journey into the Heart of Canada, by Lindalee Tracey (Douglas & McIntyre), but nevertheless once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down—except to catch my breath from time to time: I finished it in a day. On the surface, On the Edge is the story we’d all like to write: the long journey from Newfoundland to B.C. by car, checking out little towns and obscure byways, meeting people and getting to know them a little, and writing everything down—taking pictures too: making a book all the way.

Geist readers who take in the Globe and Mail will have seen a sobering feature not long ago reporting the jailing, flogging and even murdering of cartoonists who dare to satirize the governments of various countries, official religions, prominent citizens, etc. The cartoons in question were so gentle as to seem innocuous to North Americans who assume that making fun of public figures is not only a right, but a necessary check on those with power.