Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

I’ve been meaning to start this blog for over a year and kept never quite getting to it because I’m a shocking procrastinator. But a friend has just started a cooking blog to reflect on these strange times we are in, and it’s finally given me the kick up the backside I need to start putting my thoughts down on metaphorical paper instead of just thinking about it. So, on with the motley… I love books. I love buying books. I love the smell of a new book and the feeling of the cover under my fingers. I love rereading books and revisiting old friends. This blog is called Bargain Books and Medicine Chests, and these are the reasons why… Bargain books The ‘bargain books’ part is because one of my closest book shops for years was Munros in downtown Victoria, B.C. Apart from all the enticing shelves where you can spend far too much money, and believe me, I have, because really, why wouldn’t you… it also has three bargain book tables in the middle of the store that are a never-en...

Reading A Christmas Carol put me in the mood for reading other short stories. Since we’re still in the festive period I wanted something light and easy – sort of the literary equivalent of an appy. I was chuffed to remember that around the same as the Munro’s bargain book table yielded some Dickens, it also offered another quintessential English (and I say English advisedly) author – P. G. Wodehouse and My Man Jeeves. As with A Christmas Carol, my impressions of P.G. Wodehouse are coloured by adaptations, most notably by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in Jeeves and Wooster, but also by the BBC’s Wodehouse Playhouse and not least by the Croft Original Sherry ads starring a stately Michael Denison as Jeeves. To that end I was concerned that as with Dickens it would be difficult to put my previous experience aside to enjoy the ‘source material’ without preconceptions. However, the thing about P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster is that they are archetypes. Bertie really is a scatterbrained t...

I was cruising my bookshelves last week looking for a book to read in the run up to Christmas. Sometimes looking at a bookshelf is a bit like ‘shopping your closet’ where you have to look at what you’ve got with a fresh eye in the hope that something jumps out at you when you don't know what you're really in the mood for. In this case the fresh eye was noticing that I had a copy of A Christmas Carol bought on impulse from Munro’s bargain book table about 18 months ago and promptly forgotten about. Really, it might as well have been doing a dance on the bookshelf shouting ‘read me’, because if there is ever a time to read A Christmas Carol it’s in the week before Christmas. I should say at this point that I am not a Dickens fan. I remember having to read Hard Times as part of a curriculum on industrial history when I was at college and there’s nothing like forcing someone to read an author they’re already not predisposed towards, to put you off that author without ever giving th...

  I am guessing like many others, my book ‘Wish List’ is often informed by some reviews which pique my interest. That was certainly the case with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. To that end, I was delighted when my other half bought it as part of a seriously excellent book haul for my birthday back in September.   However, then I started to see it on a lot of people’s ‘Top Picks of the Year for 2020’ or other similar types of list and I began to twitch a little because I have lost count of the number of times I have read something because it was one of these end of year roundups and then been wildly disappointed that the reality didn’t lead up to the hype on the list. I know that sounds like a bit of insane troll logic because I put it on my wish list because of reviews and surely an end of year list is just another type of review? Well, both yes and no, at least in my mind. So, before I get into my thoughts on The Glass Hotel, bear with me and I’ll attempt to explai...