The film Three Seasons, a collage of small stories from modern Saigon, aroused contradictory feelings in me. The opening sequence was ravishing: at dawn in a blossom-covered lake surrounding a disused temple from some much earlier incarnation of Vietnam, girls wearing straw hats float in frail canoes, their thin clear voices raised in song as they reap ivory buds from the green leaves and glossy water.

A lot of people in the audience were talking during the screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Private Confessions, the third installment of his family trilogy. Almost everyone in the theatre looked middle-aged or even elderly, which is rare in movies these days, and they sat in couples and threesomes spread evenly throughout the theatre, with a slight increase in density toward the back.

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker’s trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently packaged in three smaller portions.

I’ve been stuck on books from Newfoundland lately, so my fingers grabbed A Settlement of Memory by Gordon Rodgers (Killick Press) when last they cruised the shelves. Inspired by William Coaker, founder of the Fisherman’s Protective Union, Rodgers has created Tom Vincent, a powerful, driven, charismatic figure.

On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker’s trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently packaged in three smaller portions.

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were “Personal Effects” by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his home in Hungary, “Going Native” by Antanas Sileika, about a family of DPs trying to fit into a Canadian suburb in the fifties, “Serendipity” by Michael Crummey, about what happens when your father is too lucky in Newfoundland, and “Devika” by Shauna Singh Baldwin, about a young Indian couple who find their own way to accommodate the expectations of Indian culture into the reality of a new home in Canada.

While doing research for a proposed TV series on heinous Victorian criminals, the hero of Paranoia in the Launderette, by Bruce Robinson (Bloomsbury), becomes convinced that there are murderers around every corner, hiding under his bed, poisoning his food, setting up elaborate plots to ambush him when he ventures out. I was laughing by the time I finished the first page: the narrator’s paranoia reminded me of childhood bedtimes when it was vital to keep all fingers, toes and ears under the covers so that no evil intruder would chop them off.

Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is subtitled “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” and is a thrilling, chilling yarn about language and a history of lexicography. Its bumptious journalistic style is irritating at times, but is made up for by fascinating details of the monumental forty-year endeavour sponsored by Oxford University Press to divert any curmudgeonly word-lover from gastric malaise.