Book Reviews

Think this book might just be for editors? Think again! Of course editors will find this an enjoyable read, but authors can find an equal amount of useful information in this little book, from the ins and outs of the editing process, to insights into the editor-author relationship. As our content theme this month has been "Ask the Editor," we thought this book review of What Editors Do would be...

Event / Book Reviews

Tomorrow, September 30, 2021, marks the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. At TEC, one way we can pay tribute to the day is to talk about ways we in the publishing and editing spheres can promote and honour Indigenous voices. So, we are pleased to  repost former TEC Editor Jonathan’s book review on Elements of Indigenous Style. Our ways of thinking and knowing...

Editing / Style / Book Reviews

niche /niːʃ/  noun 1.   a shallow recess, esp. in a wall to contain a statue etc. 2.   a comfortable or suitable position in life or employment. 3.   a specialized but profitable corner of the market: [also attributive]: niche marketing. 4.   (Ecology) a position or role taken by a kind of organism within its community.   To be honest, I had no idea what to expect when Beth first slid this slim volume across...

Business / Book Reviews

Avery Swartz is the founder and CEO of Camp Tech, and the author of See You on the Internet: Building Your Small Business with Digital Marketing (Page Two Books, 2020), a clearly explained how-to guide that demystifies digital marketing for small business owners. It introduces concepts, terminology, and practices that make up the digital world we work in and how you can set goals to build your website and kick-starting...

Book Reviews / Books And Reading

March 8 is international Women's Day, and to mark the occasion, we'd like to bring out a blog from our archives: Lesley-Anne's review of Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing, a book all about the women who changed the face of Canada's publishing and literary scene. We hope you enjoy it! 2021 UPDATE! We congratulate the author and the Press for being on the 2021 Heritage Toronto Book Awards shortlist. Stay tuned....

Book Reviews / Books And Reading

Recently, Beth saw that the University of Toronto Press would be launching a very interesting book in September: Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing by Ruth Panofsky. She and I were so intrigued, in fact, that we actually contacted the University of Toronto Press to request a copy for review! I was excited to review this book, which covers a topic that has not gotten much focus or recognition...

Writing / Writers Support Group / Book Reviews / Language & Editing

For academics across disciplines, writing and publishing journal articles is an unavoidable part of professional life. Anyone who’s been or been close to a scholar starting out in their career, struggling to find work, or approaching tenure knows that the need to publish can be a tremendous source of stress. The huge field of journal publishing can seem arbitrary and impersonal, and the connection between quality of thought...

Book Reviews

What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, edited by Peter Ginna and published by U of Chicago Press (2017), takes on an ambitious task: it provides a comprehensive overview of the state of book editing today. Ginna, whose three decades of editorial experience include major positions at trade and academic presses, has assembled an impressively credentialed roster of editors, publishers, agents, and writers. The...

Book Reviews

As the subtitle suggests, Rachel Toor's Write Your Way In (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is a book about writing an application to an American undergraduate institution (what we’d call “universities” on this side of the border). In fact, it is mainly about just one part of the application: a short personal essay that is meant to introduce the person behind the academic and extracurricular achievements detailed in the rest of...

Book Reviews

Have you heard of any strange or amusing idioms, or perhaps have one you like to use? At TEC, we’re always interested in wordplay, so we were excited when we recently received an unexpected package at the office — a large envelope from Simon & Schuster Canada filled with pre-publication copies of Watch Your Tongue: What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean by Mark Abley. We loved the...

Book Reviews

      It feels appropriate that my first post for the TEC blog is a review of a style guide. In the two months since I've started working at TEC I've spent plenty of time looking through guides like the APA Publication Manual and the massive Chicago Manual of Style. The best style guides are more than a source of rules and answers for specific questions about formatting and referencing:...

Book Reviews

    Ammon Shea's Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation (Penguin, 2014) is a usage guide of sorts, but far from being a prescriptive guide like Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage or Bremner's Words on Words, Shea's book records a variety of grammar and usage peeves, and, by examining their roots, exposes them as unfounded compulsions foisted on English users by grammar scolds.   Having previously written Reading the OED:...

Book Reviews

Dr. Bartolo's Umbrella and Other Tales from My Surprising Operatic Life By Christopher Cameron Published by Seraphim Editions, 2017   Former TEC editor Christopher Cameron's Dr. Bartolo's Umbrella is an entertaining, informative, and cheeky look at an individual's experiences working in Canadian opera. The book takes the reader through the journey of Cameron's unlikely musical beginnings, lucky breaks, hard work, and various roles within the Canadian classical music scene. ...

Book Reviews

A Review of The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston     Life in the Digital Lane It doesn't really matter where you go today, whether you're riding the subway, sitting in a coffee shop, or crossing the street, it seems that almost everyone's eyes are riveted to the screen of some device or another. Texts, emails, games, movies, TV shows . ...

Book Reviews

  Like so many projects,* it started out innocently enough: a book recommendation, interest piqued by a mark recurring throughout the text, a definition that "invited more questions than it answered. " That's all it took for Keith Houston† to plunge headlong and gleefully into a study of punctuation. The result? His 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks.     Wide-Ranging in...

Book Reviews

Zoe Whittall is the award-winning author of four novels and three books of poetry and was TEC's sponsored author at this year's Word On The Street. Her latest novel, The Best Kind of People (Anansi, 2016), is on the short list for this year's Giller Prize.  It provides a fresh take on one of the most difficult and controversial criminal and social challenges of the century. Her...

Book Reviews

The Queen of the Night Alexander Chee Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I was given this novel by someone who thought that since I had a background in opera I might get a kick out of it, the titular Queen being one of Mozart’s most famous antagonists.   The book turned out to be an enjoyable romp of a period piece – historical fiction with a vivid, but not overwhelming, operatic theme. ...

Book Reviews

The Question of Mitbringsel Part of the preparation for my latest trip to Germany involved shopping for Canadian Mitbringsel (small presents): for my colleagues in the horn section, little boxes of maple sugar candies; for my friend Peter, chef extraordinaire, a pair of oven mitts decorated with an Inuit raven motif; and for my high-spirited French friend, Delphine, a red LCBO wine cooler with a black moose printed on it....

Book Reviews

In my most recent Kobo shopping spree, I was on the hunt for some great titles to carry me through the summer. I often find that I read certain genres in phases, and this summer has been no different – I seem to be going through mysteries of various kinds at a fast pace! So if you're looking for something a little creepier than your average beach read, I've...

Book Reviews

Since having my first baby earlier this year, my book-reading time has taken a serious hit. In fact, most of my reading for the past four months has consisted in frantically scrolling through the forums at BabyCenter. ca or skimming the pages of What to Expect: The First Year while rocking a crying infant in my arms. This past month, though, the chaos has subsided somewhat. Baby Ben’s...

Book Reviews

Here at TEC, we generally view summer as prime reading time, what with all the vacations, long weekends at the cottage, and general relaxation. We've all started in on our "to be read" piles, and this summer, we'll be doing a "what we're reading" series to pass on our favourites and top choices. So, read on for Beth and Lesley-Anne's choices.     What Lesley-Anne Is Reading Over the past month,...

Book Reviews

  How do you look at a city? What do you see when you walk down its alleys, across its streets, and through its neighbourhoods? When I look out my office window at the skyscrapers and the CN Tower, I see walls of concrete and shiny sheets of glass, but Toronto wasn't always this way.   How did the city come to be? Toronto the Overwhelming I live in the GTA, not exactly...

Book Reviews

The hype generated around the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman (HarperCollins, 2015) made many of us want to read this book. After all, it was Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic in our own time. We, at TEC, were enthusiastic. We bought two copies: one for us to read in-office and one for the first of our Twitter Giveaways. ...

Book Reviews

  A good question to ask, especially when reading the University Press Issue, which was released on July 9. I happened to be at Book City on the Danforth and couldn't resist picking up a copy. The New York Review of Books is, of course, an undisputed source of information for all books literary, poetic, academic, geographic, historical, and the list goes on, which makes for incredibly engaging reading....