Recent reading

I’ve taken some time during the past few days to catch up on reading that accumulated over the past winter. It's been quite the luxury!

Between a 40th-anniversary history of Vancouver’s Alcuin Society, the latest issue of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada and various trade periodicals, I began reading Susan McCaslin, Conversing with Paradise (1986). It’s one of the books I picked up in Seattle earlier this year. McCaslin’s work echoes that of William Blake, in whose tradition she places herself, but it is also thoroughly contemporary. She achieves a spiritual language missing from the contemporary language liturgies developed for Canada’s mainline churches at the time Conversing appeared. And in doing so, her work seems to come that much closer to the voice of the psalms and early church anthems those liturgies sought to echo.

But the work that has prevented me from doing much leisure reading of this sort lately persists: This week, I continue to round out some major assignments as well as produce a new crop of stories for Business in Vancouver, Country Life in BC and Good Fruit Grower on the latest in the B.C. real estate market, the growing demand for migrant labour in B.C.'s agriculture sector, and news of interest to local greenhouse growers.