[NON BLOG] Some More Things I Like

[rfmcdonald]

• Yonge Street and Bloor Street West. I like the different streets and neighbourhoods of Toronto for different reasons. These streets attract me because they're so active and attractive. Bay Street's fine skyscrapers give that street a distinctive character but the street is too broad and underpopulated to feel particularly intimate, while Queen Street West certainly has a sense of compactness and busyness throughout its length but feels as if it's trying too hard. Yonge and Bloor feel very credibly urban, and very wonderfully civilized in all of the senses of that word.


• The Toronto Public Reference Library. This library has six levels. I haven't gotten past the second floor. I do not know when I will do this. I do not think that I care. I do not think that anyone who knows of my work background and/or my interest in the written word needs to ask why I don't care.


• A Deepness in the Sky. There's something appropriate in the fact that I began reading this 1996 book by Vernor Vinge, prequel of sorts to the 1992 A Fire Upon the Deep, almost exactly two years after I bought a copy of A Fire Upon the Deep on the strength of James B.'s recommendation of the two books to me. A Deepness in the Sky is a very strong book, one that I enjoyed more than its far-future galactic-rim space-operatic successor. Perhaps this is because Vinge's Qeng Ho sublight trading culture is more generic and hence more readily comprehensible than A Fire Upon the Deep's Singularity-era interstellar civilization. Even so, there was something fundamentally appealing about the book, and I've the utmost admiration for any writer who can make arachnoid aliens so plausible.


• The Western Mediterranean World. I first came across this geographical survey of the lands surrounding the western lobe of the Mediterranean--the Iberian peninsula, Mediterranean France, Italy, the Dalmatian coastline of then-Yugoslavia, the Maghreb--in the Education Library at Queen's last October; a month later, I acquired a copy of my own via a sale at the Kingston public library. The book dates from the 1960s--Italy is caught midway through its economic boom, Spain at its boom's beginning, the Maghreb just after decolonization-but it does a fantastic job of describing the physical and human textures of the territory. Books like these make me wish that UPEI had a geography program.


• Eating out. Prince Edward Island got its first Indian restaurant in 2002--or is it 2003? Kingston's restaurants provide the interested diner with many more opportunities for eating out. Toronto offers the quasi-gourmand wannabe another couple of orders of magnitude more choice. Inasmuch as, right now, I'm an Unemployed Young Post-Student (tm), I don't have the funds needed to explore these choices on my own. I have gone on dates recently, though, and I can confirm La Paloma and Dutch Dreams each offer excellent ice creams in the Italian and Dutch traditions, respectively, while Café Diplomatico
and the Retro Café are rather nice restaurants. Each in its own way, of course. Smaller hole-in-the-wall type restaurants like neighbourhood bars and downtown pizza places also have their charm.