Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

The power of the Bargain Book table is that it entices you to buy books you wouldn’t otherwise have considered. I’m not particularly a fan of crime novels and thrillers. I’ve always felt I get enough of that watching the news in real life without making it recreational. So I’m always a bit surprised with myself when I see a book in these genres that entices me to buy. Apart from my antipathy towards crime novels, I nearly didn’t buy The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny because of its title. The word ‘brutal’ automatically made me think of the kind of excessive violence that really turns me off a book. However, there was something about the book, sitting on the bargain table at Munros that made me pick it up. I think it was the colours on the cover – rich deep browns and reds of autumn trees (or at least that’s what they look like to me) that made stop and consider it. Whoever wrote the blurb on the back cover also did their job well because in reading it, I was intrigued, so in the...

Like millions of people around the world I’ve been watching with horror the events in the US following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The provocative rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump turns my stomach, and the understandable emotions of the protestors in every state leaves me feeling at a loss as to how the US can regain its equilibrium in the face of such division. I don’t know what I can do, as one person, not even living in the US, but in its northern neighbour, other than to self-check my own biases (conscious or unconscious), call out racism when I come across it, and try to be part of a population that realises that Canada too has its own racism issues, especially with the Indigenous peoples of our country. When I’m unsettled, I usually turn to my bookshelves to regain some equilibrium. I lifted and laid down a dozen books before I remembered a copy of Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou. It’s a series of essays and poems dedica...