In relation to last week’s post about ways to innovate newspaper book sections, Canada’s National Post has an interesting idea—tap readers to blog about their reading of a book that relates to their expertise. The paper’s arts blog, The Ampersand, has invited a Toronto police officer to write about her experience reading Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life. The first entry shines a little light on how different Toronto cops are from Price’s NYC ones:
When night watch detectives exit a tenement across the street from the scene, Matty watches as “one of them makes slant eyes with her fingertips, i.e., crammed to the rafters with Fooks”. Truly bad form if you’re a policing employee, it would be like openly farting or picking your nose in a five-star dining room. Twenty years ago we may have grunted and made such racial slurs, but that kind of behaviour is verboten “standing order 24” we say (racist comments, etc, etc will be punished, blah blah).
markathitakis.com 