I finally got around to reading the much-talked-about Hunger Games Trilogy and really enjoyed them!
The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to [...]

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Alan Weisman has written a clever science book – a thought experiment that considers what would happen if all of humanity vanished suddenly (a scarily plausible thought), leaving behind our homes, cities, infrastructure and ecosystems to fend for themselves. The result is a gripping account of nature’s unrelenting, powerful forces reclaiming our world and wiping [...]

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Very excited congratulations go out to my friend Louis Dozois and his dedicated team at Northern Bytes who are living the dream by publishing their epic indie iPhone game, “World to Conquer“!

WtC is a turn-based hex-grid re-imagining of Final Fantasy Tactics, with more than a dozen character classes and tons of spells and powers. So [...]

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Madeleine L’Engle is one freaky-deaky young adult author. I read A Wind In The Door as a kid, but all I could remember was a vague recollection of talking mitochondria – so I gave it a second reading this week and rediscovered her trippy dimension-hopping, telepathy-wielding, scale-breaking stories.

The main character, Meg, is a confident, capable [...]

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Earlier in the winter I stole one of Natasha’s book club titles to find out what all the fuss was about. Room by Emma Donoghue (a Canadian!) tore up the best-seller charts for good reason, it’s an excellent book that’s difficult to put down.

Room is written from the perspective of Jack, a 5 year old [...]

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I don’t know if it’s that games were hard to come by when I was a kid or that I’m infinitely patient, but I’m philosophically opposed to starting a new game while leaving one incomplete, which Call of Duty 2 makes particularly frustrating. (Yes, I recognise that I’m a full 5 years behind)
The problem with [...]

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I was listening to Q on CBC late one night as Natasha and I often do while getting ready for bed, and there was a panel of people (who I thought were “Canada Reads” panelists) discussing books. One panelist, with only a few seconds to pitch “The Book of Night Women” by James Marlon, described [...]

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Quite a lot’s been said about Avatar this week – but I had an opportunity to go check it out for myself last night and it greatly surpassed my expectations. Go see it!
Plotwise, it felt like James Cameron lifted pages directly from “Dances with Wolves” and “The Last Samurai”, and then threw a bunch of [...]

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I saw the movie Gamer earlier in the week with Ron, John, and Don. If you “ah” the “on” in Jason we all have rhyming names.
Right – so the film was bad. It had some really clever ideas (mostly ripped from Running Man and Smash TV), there were some really oddball amusing scenes (including a [...]

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For our anniversary, Natasha and I followed up on a hot tip from a couple of sources and managed to get in to Atelier Restaurant, which resulted in the singlemost exciting culinary experience that either of us have ever been a part of. I don’t think I can recommend it enough – Chef Marc Lepine [...]

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