Bargain Books and Medicine Chests

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...

I seem to have got in a groove of reading non-fiction at the moment. I have god knows how many novels started – to the extent that I’m now having to search for bookmarks as my previous forest of bookmarks are all being used for X marks the spot on all the books that I’m not reading. I think part of it is the continued Covid weirdness where I can’t quite commit to narratives, so non-fiction books, especially memoirs, feel easier to read in increments when I’m in the mood. Add to this is that we’ve got seriously ‘smoky skies’ on the island just now which is caused by the drift from the wildfires in Oregon, Washington State and California. I’ve been watching the news in horror and can’t imagine what it’s like if you’re living in one of the wildfire areas. I know we’re very fortunate not to have had a bad wildfire season this year in B.C. but living with the constant haze and resultant diminishing air quality is bad enough. It’s kind of counter intuitive because the crappy atmospherics s...

  The Ravenmaster is a blokey book. By that I don’t mean that it is written for blokes. I mean that Christopher Skaife writes as if he’s just come up beside you at the bar in the pub, and while you’re waiting to be served, you both start talking about ‘what you do’, and he starts talking about Ravens and the Tower of London and what it’s like to be in charge of seven very individual and idiosyncratic birds. While  you’re having that conversation, waiting for your pint or glass of wine or whatever, he’ll be down-to-earth, funny, self-deprecating and passionate and he’ll never once make you feel like your own job is dull as ditch water, but after you both leave the bar, you’ll probably think ‘wow, someone actually has that job and you know, he just seems like a normal bloke except he lives in a royal palace and looks after birds that supposedly have the fate of their nation in their claws’. Christopher Skaife is the titular Ravenmaster and since the book is subtitled ‘My Life wi...

  A couple of weeks ago when I wrote about Rivers of London , I said that it was a very British book. Extending that thought, The Bertie Project by Alexander McCall Smith is a very Scottish book, and even more than that, it is a specific subset – it is a very Edinburgh book. I don’t mean that you can’t enjoy the story if you’re not familiar with Edinburgh – you would enjoy it in the same way as you’d enjoy Rivers of London even if you weren’t familiar with London, because in both cases the authors are skilled enough to give you enough information even if you’re not intimate with the environment. Having said that, I’m very familiar with Edinburgh. Okay, it was in the 1980’s when I spend four years there as a student, but in a city as old as Edinburgh, while some of the infrastructure is different now, the one thing that doesn’t change is the basic city centre layout – the castle, the Old Town and university, the New Town, the established schools, the museums, galleries and other...

Mark Haddon is well known as the author of the acclaimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. For some reason I've never quite got around to it, so my introduction to this author is through his second novel, A Spot of Bother. A Spot of Bother is the tragi-comic tale of George Hall – 61, recently retired, contemplating a life of comfortable dullness when he discovers a weird looking lesion on his hip and immediately jumps to the conclusion that he is going to imminently die of skin cancer. Add into the mix that he finds it almost impossible to talk to his wife Jean about personal matters, his extremely opinionated daughter Katie is set on marrying Ray, a match her parents think is totally unsuitable, and the wedding means they’ll have to extend an invitation to his son Jamie’s boyfriend Tony. All in all, George begins to find retirement just a tad stressful and as the family situation escalates, George’s mental state gradually morphs from stress into anxiety ...

It’s true to say that whether you enjoy a book or not, or even whether you finish it, can often be as much about the mood you were in at the time as it is about the literary, or otherwise, merits of the book in question. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch has been sitting on my bookshelves since 2014 when we had a brief sojourn back to Blighty in an expensive experiment to prove that we’d rather be in Canada after all. Anyway, back to the book in question. It had been recommended by practically everyone I know back in the UK, and that was enough for me to seek it out, and at the time I think it was also a way of connecting back with the UK after years away because Rivers of London is by its nature a very British book. With that in mind and given that our attempt to fit back into British life was not altogether a success, in retrospect it’s perhaps no surprise that I didn’t get on with the book. I mean, I really didn’t get on with it. I started it, but while it was a perfectly ok...

It’s been about 10 days since I finished History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund and I’ve had to let it sit in my brain and fester a bit before I felt I had my thoughts in order. First up, a bit about the book. It’s a first novel and tells the story of Linda, a teenage girl growing up in very rural Minnesota who befriends a young mother and her four year old son who have moved in to a summer cabin on the other side of the lake while they wait for the arrival of the absent academic husband/father. The relationship between Linda, the mother and son is at the heart of the story. Additionally, we have a picture of rural and small-town Minnesota – a teacher who may or may not be guilty of child pornography. A fellow pupil who may or may not have had a relationship with the teacher. On top of that we have a time shift with adult Linda looking back at the events of her teenage years and we see how they affected her initial and continuing maturation into adulthood. That’s a lot of stuff ...

If I was trying to find a literary illustration for the term ‘curate’s egg’ for someone who’d never heard of the phrase, I could do a lot worse than point them at Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. I’m torn between trying to decide if it is a good book with bad bits or a bad book with good bits. Before I get into the whys and wherefores of those feelings, a bit about the book. As the title suggests this is set during World War II. Our heroine is Maggie Hope, a Brit by birth and Bostonian by upbringing who is settled in London in 1940 after trying and failing to sell her grandmother’s rambling Victorian house in London. After one of Churchill’s secretaries is killed, Maggie is persuaded, against her better judgement, to take on the job and from her position in the corridors of Downing Street and the bunkers of the Cabinet War Rooms she is drawn into the intrigues of the different factions jockeying for power behind the scenes in Churchill’s first months in office....

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...