The Seated View

How were your holidays? I hope they were fantastically wonderful and that you got to have a lot of rest. Personally, I’m not quite done with sleeping yet, but here we are back in the active part of the calendar yet again. As my thinking processes are still being dragged kicking and screaming into 2018, I thought I’d start with something fairly easy (for both of us). Something random and chatty seemed to be a good way to kick off a brand new year. Oh, snap with the cold snap via GIPHY   As Santa arrived in Canada from the North Pole bringing presents for all good boys and girls, he also brought a polar vortex with him. Perhaps he doesn’t give coal anymore? Or maybe it was never that,   but someone misunderstanding the term and actually what the Naughty List gets is C-O-L-D. If that’s the case, we have been very, very Naughty indeed. There are parts of Canada that are colder than the North Pole, and Arctic, and Mars . One of those places is Toronto, whi...

I've always looked to books for inspiration, information and community. This can be especially helpful when you have a chronic illness — adapting is hard and reading how others have found a way through can make a tremendous difference. In my new slideshow for HealthCentral, I have put together a collection of the best chronic illness books for you: "Having a chronic illness adds a unique challenge and perspective to your life. Adapting to this and finding a way to live your life to the fullest requires support and information from many different places. Some of the best resources are books written by others who live with chronic illness. These authors provide information and inspiration that we can use to help with our own journey. Even better, they make us feel part of a community — rejoicing in the “me too” moments and sharing both tears and laughter. Here are some of the best chronic illness books to help you get started." Find out what's on my list of ...

  If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety, read Turtles All the Way Down . There are also a lot of other reason is to read the book. It’s an amazing story of friendship, of growing up, of love in many different forms, of obsessions, compulsions, and finding a way to live in this world. If you have read any of John Green’s other books — for instance, Searching for Alaska and of course The Fault in Our Stars — you know already that he is a brilliant writer. And he is again in his new book Turtles All the Way Down . The book is about Aza Holmes, a teenage girl living in Indianapolis. It’s about her best friend Daisy, her mom, her car Harold and what it/he means to her, and Davis, the boy with whom she may be falling in love. It is also, both tangentially and overarchingly, about a tuatara. Aza has OCD. She going to school, she spends time with her friends, and she hangs on by her fingernails, trying to con...

Atticus O’Sullivan lives a mostly quiet life in Tempe, Arizona with Oberon, his Irish wolfhound. He runs an occult bookshop, hangs out with his friends, and his biggest problem is a cranky neighbour. Well, and that he’s been hiding from Aenghus Óg, the Celtic god of love for well over a thousand years and that his closest friends are a werewolf and a vampire. Perhaps I forgot to mention that Atticus is a druid and 2000 years old, give or take a few years? Oh, and that although the books take place in our world, there is also another very richly developed, as well as very hidden, world filled with supernatural beings, such as several pantheons of gods, some werewolf packs, and a lively vampire community. But there is only one druid. All the rest are gone, most of them killed during Roman times during an extermination of sacred groves and druids masterminded by the vampires and executed by the Romans. And that’s just the background story and the beginning of Ho...