Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

 I’ve decided to put my blog on hiatus for a couple of months. It was always meant to add some fun and thoughtfulness to my reading, but I’ve been finding lately that it’s actually been getting in the way because I’ve noticed that I’ve been reading with an eye on ‘WHAT I’M GOING TO SAY…’ rather than just reading for enjoyment and then deciding what I think after I’m finished. Recently, this has been making me feel like I’m planning a self-inflicted book report for school rather than my general rambling thoughts about a book.  I know a lot of this is related to general COVID grumpiness – I’m reading a lot because there is very little else to do and instead of allowing a book to take me on a journey, I’m finding myself stuck in the present because I’m taking notes for what I’m going to say in my comments. So much is out of our control at the moment, but reading and thinking about reading in the time of COVID is within my control because this is my blog. To this end I’m going t...

To me, Bernard Cornwell is best known for writing the Sharpe novels and The Last Kingdom novels, with both sagas being made into successful TV series over the years.  So I was curious when I came across a stand-alone Bernard Cornwell on the Bargain Book Table last year, especially one with the intriguing premise that Fools and Mortals promised on the back cover. Fools and Mortals is lifted from a line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck says “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”  It’s a nice choice of title because one of the main plot lines of the book is William Shakespeare and his company planning and rehearsing the inaugural performance of the play to celebrate the wedding of the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter. Having said that, one of the great conceits of the book is the story isn’t really about William Shakespeare at all, even though he’s one of the chief protagonists. It’s about Richard Shakespeare, one of his brothers. Cornwell has taken the fact that Richard ac...

  I’ll start by saying that A Promised Land is a looooong read. The hardback weighs in at 701 pages, not including Acknowledgements and Index and I have to say that the index is very comprehensive. I got it for Christmas 2020, which was a lovely surprise. It had been on my book wish list, which I handily keep very visible so the husband can see it, but I hadn’t actually expected to get the hardback because a book of this size ain’t cheap. I’ve been picking away at it through January and February, mainly reading a chapter or two every couple of days with a cup of tea in the afternoon – I would say it’s probably not a bedtime read because it’s a book that definitely requires concentration. I’m not American, but I did emigrate to Canada the year before Obama became US president and I do live right on the 49 th parallel so I read this book as a more than interested bystander to this period of US political and social history. Opinions differ on whether he was a good or effective presid...

 One of the joys of the Bargain Book Table is coming across something you might never normally have noticed, but that turns out to be joyous. As I’ve said elsewhere, books are all about risk and reward and oh boy, with Treasure Palaces edited by Maggie Fergusson it was all about the reward. Treasure Palaces is subtitled ‘Great Writers Visit Great Museums’ and the book does what it says on the tin (with bells on…) It’s a collection of 24 essays by eminent writers about their favourite museums and it started life as a series of pieces in Intelligent Life, the sister magazine to The Economist, with the premise that a writer (who isn’t an art critic) would return to a museum that had played a part in their life and write about any aspect of it – the building, the collection, the originator – while weaving in elements of personal memoir. The original magazine collection ran to 38 essays and I can honestly say that the only thing I’m disappointed about with this book is that they had to ...

  You can come to a new book in so many ways – a review, a recommendation from a friend, desperation at the airport or station where you will sometimes buy just about anything so you have something to while away a few hours when you can’t go anywhere. I’ve bought books on the basis of all three of these and I think most people would agree that the first two methods are usually, but not always the most reliable because it’s really embarrassing when a friend loves something you really hate! I came to Giovanni’s Room after reading an interesting interview with Sharmaine Lovegrove who has worked as a bookseller for over twenty years, but couldn’t get a job in publishing. She argues that there is a real disconnect between the publishing industry and readers. The interview is worth reading in its own right, but it also lead me to another article written two years earlier in which she takes about the lack of diversity in UK publishing, her own history as a book seller including openin...

I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share about How to Stop Time (and some might say I haven't had any deep thoughts about any of the books I've read and reviewed so far for this blog, but that is another thing altogether…), but the one thing I do have to say is that I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wanted a light, quick, easy, well written and engaging read. Our hero is Tom Hazard, a 41-year-old Englishman who is just about to start a new job as a history teacher at a London secondary school. The only trouble is that Tom Hazard isn’t his real name – well, not his full name, anyway –   he’s not 41 and he’s not really English. Because Tom is over 400 years old, comes from French aristocratic stock and suffers from a rare disease called anageria, which radically slows down the aging process. The idea of the disease is a lovely conceit because it allows Matt Haig to have Tom participate in the momentous events as well as the smal...

 One of the attractions of the Bargain Book Table is that it sometimes entices me to read authors I’ve never got around to reading, but who I feel I should have read. Edna O’Brien is one of those authors. When I saw one of her later novels, The Little Red Chairs on the bargain table sometime last year  I automatically picked it up, and after reading the blurb on the back, I was intrigued enough to decide it might be time to rectify my omission. Having finally got around to reading it, I’ve been struggling to get to the bottom of what I felt about this book until I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother many, many years ago (as in the 1980s years ago). We had rented One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on VHS from the local video store (ah remember VHS!). I’d seen the film before and read the book, but my brother hadn’t. At the end (oh god, that ending…) I remember asking my brother what he thought of it. After a pause he said that he thought it was a brilliant film, ...

I felt a little bad on Christmas Day 2019 when the husband opened his presents, which were inevitably mostly books, and he didn’t get one of the books he was expecting. The book was Me, the newly minted autobiography of Elton John. The trouble was, I didn’t know he wanted it, or I would have bought it. Note to husband, contrary to popular belief I am not psychic, not even after 30+ years together. The main reason I didn’t know he wanted it (apart from him not telling me…) is that he reads mostly science-based non-fiction so, much as he is an Elton John fan, it never occurred to me that he might want to read this autobiography. One upside was that come Christmas 2020 I had one sure fire hit for a present when the paperback came out, especially as it was updated with a new chapter to account for the weirdness of a COVID-centric year. Needless to say, he was delighted to receive the book, especially as he’d forgotten about it in the intervening year. Even more of a bonus was that he reall...

Buying books as presents for family tend to fall into two categories. The first are books that speak directly to that person’s interests, even if you think their interests are weird. After all it’s a present! The second category are books that they will like, but that you will like too.  Some may say this second category smacks of a little bit of enlightened self-interest, but I like to think of it as cutting down on our book-buying as one book can now be read and hopefully enjoyed by more than one person – the other person being me... I know that’s rationalizing but as John Lennon once said, “whatever gets you thru the night!” Anyway, enough self-important quotage and on with the book talk. One of the books I bought my husband this Christmas was In Praise of Paths by Torbj ø rn Ekelund. I actually bought it for his birthday in September, then finished up buying something else and forgetting I had it at the bottom of a drawer. So that was a result come Christmas. I say it was a res...

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...

It is a very weird sensation when you read a book, enjoy it, and kind of hate yourself for enjoying it because it’s not the kind of book you ever thought you’d enjoy. That’s how I feel about I’ve Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella. I think part of my reaction is the genre it comes under – ‘chick lit’. I really hate that expression. Personally, I find it pejorative. Firstly, it seems to suggest that women only like books that are ‘fluffy’, where the heroine is probably ditzy, gets her guy in the end and where it is mandatory to have at least a percentage of pink on the cover. I mean god forbid women might like a ‘non-fluffy’ book. Also, the expression feels exclusionary – it seems to suggest guys wouldn’t want to read something ‘fluffy’ because they’re always looking for guns, guts and other guy-related words beginning with ‘g’. So, yes, the expression ‘chick lit’ bugs me and because of that I’ve tended to avoid books that come under that banner. So, having said all that, why was I re...