Every April, the Toronto Public Library celebrates the city's thriving literary culture with the Keep Toronto Reading festival. Once again, Spacing is delighted to partner with TPL for KTR's city-wide book club, One Book. This year's book, Girls Fall Down, is a story in which the Toronto cityscape plays a starring role, and we're particularly excited about the many related events happening all month: walking tours that follow ...

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Judy Fong Bates's Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, the story of a young Chinese-Canadian growing up in small-town Ontario in the late 50s and early 60s. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. The Chou family loves to visit Toronto; they are the only Asians in Irvine, Ontario, and feel at home along the busy streets of Chinatown, where they can visit relatives and speak their own language. In the early 1960s, Su-Jen’s family begins to travel to and from Toronto more often. There are several reasons for the increased frequency of these trips. The dark secrecy that drives the plot of Midnight at the Dragon Café is truly what drives the family an hour west: the arrival of Su-Jen’s tense, angry older brother, her mother’s misery, her father’s increasing loneliness. Toronto is a means of escape. But the more literal reason the family begins to make the journey is interesting in its own right: in the early 1960s, the Highway 401 finally passed through Irvine:

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Judy Fong Bates's Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, the story of a young Chinese-Canadian growing up in small-town Ontario in the late 50s and early 60s. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. With so much of Midnight at the Dragon Café taking place in the kitchen and around the tables of the Chou family’s restaurant, it’s hard to read Bates’s debut novel without getting hungry. Su-Jen’s mother, desperately homesick for Hong Kong, throws herself into cooking, the preparation of elaborate means  “the only thing that [gives] her real pleasure” in Canada. While the family dines on such mouthwatering dishes as “sliced white chicken, beef hot-pot with dried bean curd…plump glistening scallops fried with greens and mushrooms, a whole fish steamed with ginger and scallions,” their restaurant serves mostly greasy spoon favourites, and what the family jokingly refer to as “fool the lo-fon food”; American Chinese food preferred by the white residents of Irvine, Ontario.

Every April, Toronto Public Library hosts the Keep Toronto Reading Festival. At the centre of the month long celebration of literacy is the One Book program, in which a single work of fiction or collection of poetry is chosen as a focal point for myriad activities and discussions — a city-wide book club of sorts, with a lot more ways to participate. Part of the fun of One Book is that the chosen volume always has ...

Once again Spacing is pleased to be a part of Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading program. This April the library hopes the whole city will join in reading Austin Clarke’s 2009 Toronto Book Award winner, More, a novel that has inner-city Toronto as its very backbone. Throughout the month, Spacing Toronto will present a series of posts exploring the book and its relationship to our city. (Queen St., Eastern Ave. and Kingston Rd., formerly the Greenwood Raceway) From Austin Clarke's More: “When I fry-up these six trout fishes, you going to see something girl! As a matter of fact, the two o’ wunnuh going taste something! I frying them in olive oil, with a lil white sugar sprinkle-over them, some lime juice, and Jesus Christ…” “You went to the Kensington Market?” she asked him “A hundred! One hundred dollars I win today at the races,” he said, touching the fish; and replacing them in a line when they squiggled for their short freedom on the slippery table. (pg. 45) At the races, he was a different man. He walked in dressed like a racing steward, or a horse owner, with a folded copy of the Toronto Star in the side pocked of his sports jacket, and in the other pocket a copy of the Racing Form, where the horoscopes of horses were printed, along with the program for the day. […] In those days Bertram went to the track the whole day, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He “passed-round just to see how things were” on the other days of the week, sneaking off from work to “place one bet on one race.” He had a temporary job, a seven-to-six job, six days a week, delivering advertising brochures. “That man spends all his time, losing every penny…” she said this every Friday night and every Saturday night, and repeated it every Sunday night, to herself. His betting and losing sucked the energy she needed to concentrate on her Bible reading, on her textbook on Nursing, and on choosing her dress to wear to church… (pp. 84-86) Before coming to Canada, Bertram was a mechanic’s apprentice who spent his off-time at Bridgetown’s Garrison Savannah (not to be confused with Toronto’s own Garrison Commons track, which operated in the 1820s). Idora’s mother urges her to go to leave Barbados to get a job, to better herself, but also to “shake off the dust of that crook Bertram, especially. Escape from Bertram.” (67). But Bertram follows Idora, and brings with him his mad love of horse racing, an obsession that leaves him unemployed and penniless. It was “twenty years ago” from the novel’s present that Idora went to the bank and found that “that man” had finally drained her saving’s account. I couldn’t help but wonder if this coincided with the 1987 legalization of Sunday racing.