One of the more bizarre blogs created in Toronto has to be Seen Reading. It's the product of Julie Wilson's efforts to document what people are reading on the TTC. Not only does she keep a record of the name of the book, but she also guess-timates what passage the reader is reading at the time she spotted them and then infers some info about them and what feelings or emotions they might be experiencing at that moment in time.

Here's an example of a post about a woman she spotted on the Spadina streetcar reading John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent.

Now, someone has spied on Julie and it's our friends over at Dear Toronto. Just before Christmas they tagged along with her as she cruised the Bloor subway line looking for new material. Their video is embedded above.

There are just over two months left to save Pages Books & Magazines. Voted the Best Bookstore in Toronto by readers of this site, Pages has been an integral part of the fabric of the Queen West neighbourhood since it set up shop at Queen and John back in 1979.

In recent years, we've all watched how many of the once thriving indie shops on Queen have been forced out by escalating rents and replaced by the who's who of Canadian and multinational chains like H&M, Zara, Aritzia, Lululemon and, ughh, Crocs. Their appearance has changed the integrity and character of the once uber cool stretch between University and Spadina. It was small consolation that places like Pages and The Horseshoe remained but now there's a very real possibility that Pages will be lost.

My friend Cathy could be BFF with David Sedaris. David just doesn't know it yet.

Besides reading his articles and books, it turns out that both Cathy and David are huge fans of George Saunders. Apparently David flogs one book (in addition to his) whenever he goes out on a tour. When he asked the packed Massey Hall crowd last week if anyone had read Braindead Megaphone, he got exactly two quiet-but-enthusiastic-Torontonian-style "whoo!"s. One was from Cathy.

This summer David was in town signing books and I missed him. Luckily Cathy is smarter than I am, and found out that he was back in town in December for a reading at Massey Hall. Hot. Diggity.

Going to book the tickets though, she discovered all that was left was "partially obstructed view". I sagely pointed out to her that when we listen to him on the This American Life podcast, we have an entirely obstructed view. She acknowledged my good point, and tickets were purchased. So Cathy was there to show Braindead Megaphone (and David) some love.

Spacing magazine celebrated five years of publishing its magazine about understanding the urban landscape in Toronto on Wednesday night at The Great Hall.

As a longtime contributor, I've witnessed the magazine expand from a little-known local rag five years ago to one of the most respected sources of information on public space issues.

Spacing magazine is now much more widely read, has two blogs and has a facebook group with over 2,800 members and has won a handful of National Magazine Awards.

Every now and then I'm given the opportunity to talk with some truly amazing Torontonians. It's not something that happens as often as I would obviously like, and I cherish these conversations for what they are: rare glimpses of world that is both kinder and more caring than the one-hour-news-cycle world I read of, so often overwhelmed by rush and distant squalor.

Today I spoke with Kim Beatty, mother to The Children's Book Bank, on the day that her foundation turns six months old. In honour of the occasion, Kim and her staff of sixty volunteers threw a half-birthday party this morning at the Bank's location in Regent Park, where a majority of incomes lie below the Toronto average. The event was attended by children, regulars and not-so-regulars, and adults, including a number of supporters from the Yonge Street Mission. Also among the supporters was Marguerite Campbell, principal of Rose Avenue Public School, a kindergarten and primary school in St. James Town.

"I thought I was finished when I realized I had forgotten the skeleton guy. The composition was cramped on the left of the page, so I just drew another piece of floaty rock, and I thought 'oh he looks kind of lonely back there,' so I put some mantas flying around him. And I was like 'oh he's kind of separate from the group now. He kind of looks evil. He's a bad guy. Oooh, he's the bad guy! Nice.'"

Ramon Perez is explaining his creative process to me over coffee at Cafe Diplomatico. When we met, Sunday of last week, he was coming off two all-nighters at his College Street studio, a Friday morning class he teaches at Max the Mutt Animation School, and, I think, a wedding. He talks fast.

Ramon, in my opinion, is one of those young artists who has cut his chops and, in ten years, will be the artist that younger self-starters, like his current self, hope to share a table with at conventions. He is the local writer-illustrator behind Kukuburi, a web comic that invokes some of the unearthly weirdness of a J. Gourmelin sketch, but with flying whales. We chatted about his career and his ample portfolio, which includes work for Lucasfilm, an as yet un-nameable Dark Horse Comics project, and a solo noir graphic novel set in fifties Toronto.