Blog Archives
The sorry state of everything: The June 2026 Bibliofiles
Lately I’ve been reading about the sorry state of:
- tech
- books coverage
- the World Cup
- weird lit
- publishing tax credits
- and dead gods
That’s what passes for summer reading with me!
Fiction
Godfall by Bruno Lombardi
Imagine a whalefall, only with the body of a god.
When a god falls screaming from the sky and comes to rest in the depths of the sea, creatures of all sorts come to scavenge its body — including the people that live nearby. But giving up the fishing life to scavenge the remains of a god comes at a price.
Link: https://magazine.trollbreath.com/godfall/
Non-fiction
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
We’ve all had a feeling that the Internet and other new technologies have been getting worse for some time, perhaps even since the moment they were launched. Cory Doctrow has given this a name — enshittification — and says it is intentional.
Doctorow lists case after case of tech companies that offered a useful product, then slowly made it worse for users to extract the maximum value possible, until the product itself has been transformed into something terrible and often bad for its once enthusiastic fan base. Apple, Facebook, Netflix, X (formerly known as Twitter) — they’re all indicted here and rightfully so. Doctorow isn’t wrong in his claims.
This isn’t just a catalog of companies gone bad, however. Doctorow suggests much more is at stake if we don’t take action to push back against such enshittification. Once again, he’s correct. If the companies know we’ll roll over and take whatever abuse they have to offer, then why would they change their ways?
Doctorow pushes for a number of actions, all of which prioritize consumer rights. But really, the best action may be to rethink our relationships with tech altogether, such as many are trying to do with AI at the moment. It’s useful here to consider the proposals of another thinker on the subject, Cal Newport, who in his book Digital Minimalism argues we have become subservient to new technologies and we need to reverse that relationship. To do so, we must consciously determine what we need from such products and use them only in ways that serve us rather than the other way around.
Both Doctorow and Newport may be unrealistically hopeful in their views that we can prevent or at least navigate the enshittification of well, everything, but where will we end up if we don’t at least try?
Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes
Pete Holmes takes you through the history of his life in Comedy Sex God, and the title pretty much reflects it all. Holmes grapples with faith in God when his marriage falls apart, then finds a path toward a new sort of spiritualism and love as his comedy career takes off. It’s a thoughtful — and yes, comic — account of his struggle to make meaning of his life. While it may mainly be for fans of his comedy, it’s also an intriguing read for anyone who is looking for ways to find God in the world itself outside of the traditional dogma of religions.
Related reads would include Nick Cave’s Faith, Hope and Carnage and Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss.
While others downsize literary coverage into oblivion, we’re launching a books section by Carmine Starnino
The Walrus is trying to resurrect the books section of opinion and literary feuding.
“I want the section to not just point to the latest interesting reads. I want it to be the spearpoint of a broader return to a kind of consensus-testing commentary that is harder and harder to find. I want more reassessments, more polemics, more manifestos, more feuding. I want the spectacle of people publicly wrestling with ideas they care about too much. I want everyone, at some point, to end up a bit offended.”
I’m not one for literary feuds but I do like a good manifesto! We’ll see how this turns out.
The World Cup is an economic sinkhole by Moshe Lander
I’ve somehow found myself to be a middle-aged soccer dad despite never being an athlete in my life, so I was initially excited about the World Cup coming to Vancouver.
Until I saw the ticket prices, of course. And realized how much it was costing the city and country.
Is the World Cup a good investment? Maclean’s certainly doesn’t think so.
Time will tell, I suppose.
Link: https://macleans.ca/economy/the-world-cup-is-an-economic-sinkhole/
Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird by Cynthia Ward
Make sword & sorcery weird again.
“I began reading and writing S&S mid-century because, damn, was it weird! S&S prose and comics had barbarians and Amazons and nomads. Sorcerers and witches and priests. Mercenaries and pirates and thieves. Demons and gods and dinosaurs. Peasants and princesses and kings. Elves and dwarves and mer-folk. Bards and spear-women and serial killers. The disabled and the maimed and the accursed. And any of these characters could have a starring role, and many of the stars occupied more than one category (most famously, Elric of Melniboné, the disabled nonhuman prince granted strength by a demonic sword, and Conan of Cimmeria, barbarian, thief, mercenary, pirate, king, and more).”
Link: https://reactormag.com/the-rebirth-of-sword-and-sorcery-and-the-death-of-the-weird/
The case for a federal publishing tax credit by Marc Cote
Does Canada need a federal tax credit program to support Canadian book publishers? If Canadians want to read Canadian stories, then something needs to be done.
Link: https://quillandquire.com/omni/opinion-the-case-for-a-federal-publishing-tax-credit/
New stories on the way
I’ve had a lovely month on the writing front and have signed contracts to publish three new stories in some of my favourite magazines: Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Trollbreath and Black Cat Weekly.
Check out the magazines today and read some of the great stories published in them while you wait for my new tales.
Everyone reading this is a suspect: The December 2025 Bibliofiles
December saw me on a mystery reading binge. Why do my thoughts turn to murder around Christmastime? Who can say…?
Fiction
Ocean Drive by Sam Wiebe
Hard-boiled British Columbia.
That’s what best describes Sam Wiebe’s Ocean Drive, a dirty thriller set in the idyllic community of White Rock on BC’s West Coast. Only this paradise by the water has a seamy underside of sex, drugs and murder. Lots of murder.
Ocean Drive tells two stories: that of Cam, a troubled young man who’s just been released from prison for manslaughter; and Meghan, a divorced “cop mom” who’s trying to solve a murder where Cam quickly becomes a suspect.
Both are caught up in a world of urban gangsters and a changing world, where the old farmland of the West Coast is being replaced by urban sprawl and casinos, and society is increasingly divided between the generationally wealthy and those who can never get ahead.
Ocean Drive could have been pulled from the headlines of BC’s newspapers — it has bloody gang warfare, crooked lawyers, desperate losers, infamous criminal brothers and cops that walk all the grey alleys in between.
You’ll never look at Beautiful BC the same again.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200358289-ocean-drive
Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
Author Ernest Cunningham joins a writers fest on a cross-country train in Australia in the hopes of finding inspiration to follow his debut book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. You can probably see where this is going right away and, yes, his fellow travellers are a cast right out of a classic murder mystery novel in an even more classic setting. The bodies start piling up and each of the suspects has their own secrets, grudges and schemes — layers upon layers of secrets, grudges and schemes in fact. What makes the novel all the more fun is that the suspects are writers, publishers and agents.
And Everyone On This Train Is a Suspect is very fun. It’s not just a murder mystery with multiple bodies but a meta-mystery with one of the most unique and clever narrators ever in the genre. Cunningham — or is that Stevenson? — knows all the rules of mystery novels and delights in incorporating them all into his tale with conspiratorial charm, delivering a masterclass in storytelling to the reader in a wonderfully self-aware reinvention of the genre. It’s clever and funny while at the same time being a wicked mystery.
Truly a revelation!
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167006698-everyone-on-this-train-is-a-suspect
Rashomonster by Michael Allen Rose
This rather sums up this bizarro monster story:
“The wolfman, in human form, attended a birthday party, which his friends had put together for him. At some point in the evening, two children played a prank resulting in the wolfman being fully startled, and this caused an expulsion of breath beyond normal expectations, setting a nearby mummy on fire. The wolfman, still human, tried to extinguish said mummy, but due to a mixture of incompetence and comic misadventure, the wolfman caught fire as well, was horribly burned and otherwise injured, and proceeded to transform into a wolf, because of the stress. The wolfman was subsequently taken to the veterinarian by Frankenstein’s non-monstrous person consisting of collected body parts repurposed for new opportunities.”
Link: https://magazine.trollbreath.com/rashomonster-2/
Non-fiction
How to Fix Book Publishing by Kenneth Whyte
Canadian-published books now account for less than 5% of the Canadian publishing market — and the situation is getting worse, not better. How to turn that around?
How about reinventing the PLR (public lending right program) to better reward authors with Canadian publishers and the publishers themselves?
Link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-180628703
Keep Going by Austin Kleon
Keep Going by Austin Kleon is a slim little book but it’s one of my most highlighted books after only one read. Billing itself as a primer on “ways to stay creative in good times and bad,” Keep Going is an informal yet deeply insightful series of meditations on not only the importance of creativity but the sustainability of creativity.
Kleon acknowledges the world can beat down creatives but that a shift in mindset can keep creativity alive. Focus on the daily rituals and routines of creativity and find a “bliss station” so that the creative practice becomes not a means to some illusory goal but a meaningful thing on its own.
Keep Going isn’t a how-to manual or a deep dive into creative strategies and techniques. It’s a book about perspective and mental shifts and probably belongs on the same shelf as James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Ryan Holiday’s Stillness Is the Key. It extends beyond creativity to living a good life overall. As Kleon says in the book: “None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40591677-keep-going
The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker
There was a time in my life when I was a graduate student eyeing the contemplative life of a professor. The Fall of the English Department by Adam Walker lists more than a few of the reasons I eventually left the ivory tower for the delightful chaos of the outside world.
Link: https://substack.com/@adamgagewalker/p-177582596
If Chatbots Can Replace Writers, It’s Because We Made Writing Replaceable by Andre Forget
“Market pressures are now so intense, and industries have become so consolidated, that a good deal of what gets published every year already reads like a photocopy of a photocopy.”
Publishing was already in trouble before AI turned up.
Link: https://thewalrus.ca/if-chatbots-can-replace-writers-its-because-we-made-writing-replaceable/
Poetry
Grawlix by George Murray
They’re not done following you,
these childish angers, like stormy
weather pushing in, memories
hovering near the edge of the panel,
peripheral to the eye.
peter darbyshire 