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The Olympic Committee is proud of its ecological consciousness and has boasted that the summer games in Paris this year will be the greenest ever. And now, thanks to the activism of numerous high-profile groups of national and international citizenry, the Games will be greener still, with the green bookseller stalls of the storied bouquinistes allowed to remain. There are numerous articles about it out there, but here are two that I think sum up the situation quite nicely:

​​​​​https://www.rawstory.com/paris-bouquinistes-resist-plans-to-remove-riverside-book-kiosks-for-2024-olympics/

https://ilab.org/article/positive-outcome-of-a-large-international-campaign-the-paris-bouquinistes-will-not-be-removed-during-the-2024-summer-olympic-games-in-paris

It seems not all sports-minded people are made in the mold of Big Bobby Clobber. Mind you, my imagination was going wild envisioning the various ways bouquiniste culture could be incorporated into a whole raft (pun definitely intended) of new Olympic sports! For example:

1) The stall disassemble/reassemble challenge: How quickly can the competing bouquinistes dismantle and reassemble their stalls without damaging the merchandise, destroying the heritage value of their structures or breaking any of the rules regarding dimensions of boxes and shelving units (any of which would result in automatic disqualification)?

2) The sniffer dog challenge: How quickly can the dogs and their handlers sniff out all the packages of explosives and illicit drugs concealed within or around the stall on the bookseller's property? To add to the fun, if the bomb goes off before it's discovered, the bookseller will be banned from Olympic competition for the next 400 years.

3) The security detail book-theft challenge: Security guards compete to foil would-be thieves from stealing books. Points awarded based on number of books and their estimated value.

I'm also mulling over a possible connection between "Share the Flame"/Olympic torch and book-burning.

Maybe you can think of a few more?

Welcome to Freedom to Read Week, February 18-24. If you live anywhere in Canada, you may be able to find an event you'd enjoy here:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/events/?syclid=cn9rscj7v77s739m300g&utm_campaign=emailmarketing_129722318918&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email

If you're in Ontario, it's Family Day and all public libraries and schools are closed. If you're in the Ottawa area, it's the final day of Winterlude and the Rideau Canal is actually open, as is the community rink around the corner from us.

Over the past year, I've been reasonably content with the (lack of) decisions to ban books. The Ottawa Public Library received 7 "requests for reconsideration" of books on their shelves and acceded to none of them:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-public-library-book-challenges-tintin-stegosaure-1.7109676?cmp=rss

In Alberta, some public library materials relating to LGBTQ+ issues were returned damaged or vandalized, but I guess the good news is that the libraries did have those items available for loan in the first place, and police were called in.

The policies in school libraries (at least the ones I've heard about) are a little less progressive. But I was cheered by this article in a Brandon, Manitoba paper in which candidates in the fall 2023 provincial election were asked about their position on censorship:

https://www.brandonsun.com/local/2023/10/19/candidates-speak-against-book-bans-at-bsd-forum

The election resulted in a change of government, a shift to the left.

I'll conclude this entry with a link to an article on recently challenged books in Canadian libraries:

https://www.freedomtoread.ca/articles/rising-tide-of-censorship-recent-challenges-in-canadian-libraries/

In 2023, I read 96 books, an average of 8 per month. That's more than I read in 2020, 2021 or 2022, although I'd have to say the reading I did during the early COVID lockdowns was rather more challenging and ambitious. The books are coded as follows:

A Anthology (a bunch of short pieces, whether stories, essays, poetry or whatever)
D Drama
F Fiction
M/B Memoir, Biography (including autobiography), Diaries etc.
NF Non-fiction, if it doesn't fit into one of the other categories above

The numbers break down as follows: 3A, 1D, 64F, 11M/B, 17NF

So here's my list (books listed in the order I read them)


1. The Story Species - Joseph Gold (NF)
2. Dreadfulwater - Thomas King (F)
3. People change - Vivek Shraya (NF)
4. I'm afraid of men - Vivek Shraya (NF)
5. Ottawa Rising - Ottawa Independent Writers (A)
6. Son of Elsewhere - Elamin Abdelmahmoud (M/B)
7. Chokepoint Capitalism - Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow (NF)
8. The Persuaders: At the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds & democracy - Anand Giridharedas (NF)
9. Devil's Delight - M.C. Beaton with R.W. Green (F)
10. The Book Eaters - Sunyi Dean (F)
11. My Darling Detective - Howard Norman (F)
12. Death takes a perfect trip - Mary Jane Maffini (F)
13. Open and Closed - Mat Coward (F)
14. Petit Pays - Gael Faye (F)
15. All the Queen's Men - S.J. Bennett (F)
16. You light up my death - Mary Jane Maffini (F)
17. The Swedish art of aging exuberantly - Margareta Magnusson (NF)
18. Gobsmacked! Peter Cleveland (F)
19. Stealing Jenny - Ellen Gable (F)
20. The Library Suicides - Fflur Dafydd (F)
21. Hobgoblins of Little Minds - Andrew J. Simpson (A)
22. The future is now - Bob McDonald (NF)
23. The Bookseller's Notebooks - Jalel Barjas (F)
24. The White Hare - Jane Johnson (F)
25. The Black Dove - Colin McAdam (F)
26.Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously - Astrid Lindgren (F)
27. Behind the scenes at the museum - Kate Atkinson (F)
28. Once upon a prime - Sarah Hart (NF)
29. L'évangile du nouveau monde -Maryse Condé (F)
30. A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon (F)
31. Book collecting now: The value of print in a digital age - Matthew Budman (NF)
32. The Little Wartime Library - Kate Thompson (F)
33. When last seen - Brenda Chapman (F)
34. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf (NF)
35. Open Heart, Open Mind - Clara Hughes (M/B)
36. Git Sync Murder - Michael Warren Lucas (F)
37. The Brothers Lionheart - Astrid Lindgren (F)
38. War Diaries 1939-1945 - Astrid Lindgren (M/B)
39. End of Story -Louise Swanson (F)
40. Astrid Lindgren: The woman behind Pippi Longstocking - Jens Andersen (M/B)
41. Vinyl Resting Place - Olivia Blacke (F)
42. The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan - Stuart Palmer (F)
43. A Natural History of Transition - Callum Angus, ed. (A)
44. Avenue of Champions - Conor Kerr (F)
45. Crow Winter - Karen McBride (F)
46. Sun Storm - Äsa Larsson (F)
47. Queen High - C.J. Carey (F)
48. Librarian Tales: Funny, strange & inspiring tales from the stacks - William Ottens (NF)
49. Maudites Rumeurs - Chantal Beauregard (F)
50. Sweden: The essential guide to customs & culture - Neil Shipley (NF)
51. The Forgotten Home Child - Genevieve Graham (F)
52. We know you remember - Tove Alsterdal (F)
53. L'Avare - Moliere (D)
54. A Nearly Normal Family - M.T. Edvardsson (F)
55. Red Wolf - Liza Marklund (F)
56. Mio, My Son - Astrid Lindgren (F)
57. The Girl with the Sturgeon Tattoo - Lars Arfssen (Lawrence Douglas) (F)
58. Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell (F)
59. The Murder of Halland - Pia Juul (F)
60. Sweet Revenge: 2 novellas (Women Without Mercy; Truth or Dare) - Camilla Lackberg (F)
61. The Survivors - Alex Schulman (F)
62. Master Detective - Astrid Lindgren (F)
63. Sweden for Beginners - Gunnar Jägberg (NF)
64. Meet me in Malmö - Torquil MacLeod (F)
65. Once upon a time in Uppsala - Shirin Amani Azari (M/B)
66. An extra pair of hands: a story of caring & everyday acts of love - Kate Mosse (M/B)
67. Crisis - Karin Boye (F)
68. The Autists: Women on the spectrum - Clara Törnvall (NF)
69. Karlsson on the Roof - Astrid Lindgren (F)
70. The Foulest Thing: A Dominion Archives mystery - Amy Tector (F)
71. Memories look at me: A memoir - Tomas Tranströmer (M/B)
72. Anywhere out of the world - Karin Tidbeck (F)
73. Speak for the dead - Amy Tector (F)
74. Red X - David Demchuk (F)
75 The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie (F)
76. Shadow Play - Peggy Blair (F)
77. Sleet - Stig Dagerman (F)
78. Loving the Difficult -Jane Rule (NF)
79. Pageboy - Elliot Page (M/B)
80. Losing the signal: The spectacular rise and fall of Blackberry - Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff (NF)
81. Encore- Alexis Koetting (F)
82. The Dogs of Winter - Ann Lambert (F)
83. An English Murder - Cyril Hare (F)
84. Reykjavik - Ragnar Jonasson & Karin Jakobsdottir (F)
85. The Power of Language: The codes we use to speak, think & live - Viorica Marian (NF)
86. Wishin' & Hopin' - Wally Lamb (F)
87. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa (F)
88. The Instant - Amy Liptrot (M/B)
89. Woman in the Shadows - Jane Thynne (F)
90. The Librarianist - Patrick DeWitt (F)
91. The Go-between: A portrait of growing up between different worlds - Osman Yousefzada (M/B)
92. Death of a Bookseller - Alice Slater (F)
93. Yule Island - Johana Gustawsson (F)
94. Tom's Story: My 16-year friendship with a homeless man - Jo-Ann C. Oosterman (M/B)
95. Blood and Circuses - Kerry Greenwood (F)
96. What you are looking for is in the library - Michiko Aaoyama (F)

I'm a huge fan of Nordic crime novels, many of them Swedish: Henning Mankell, Camilla Lackberg, Liza Marklund, Helene Tursten, Tove Alsterdal, M.T. Edvardsson, Åsa Larsson - and, of course, Stieg Larsson. So at the top of my must-see/must-do list on my recent trip to Sweden was the Stieg Larsson Millennium tour, a 2-hour guided walking tour in the Södermalm neighbourhood of Stockholm.

Although the tour itself was not until 6PM, I decided to make a day of exploring the Södermalm/SOFO part of town. I took the metro to Slussen station and then had a leisurely walk along Götgatan and Folkungagatan, grabbing a coffee along the way and stopping in at various little shops that caught my eye. I looked for (and found) the English Bookshop on Södermannagatan ... and of course that led me down a whole new rabbit hole. I wanted to buy everything but managed to limit myself to books that were of a relatively compact size and that I didn't think would be that quick or easy to obtain at home. Surprisingly, perhaps, most of them were not in the mystery or crime fiction genre; they were more in the line of memoirs and books by prominent Swedish writers like August Strindberg, Astrid Lindgren and Karin Boye. I think I'll have to devote a separate entry to discussing the books I got there. Anyway, when I was paying for it all, they gave me a slew of their bookmarks and I learned that they also had a shop in Göteborg, a city that was also on my itinerary. Yet another must-visit shop for my list! You can find out more about English Bookshop locations in Sweden at: www.bookshop.se

Then it was off to the Stockholm City Museum (Stadsmuseet), where I enjoyed an outdoor lunch followed by a pleasant afternoon exploring the museum and strolling along the waterfront.

After all that walking and still with time to kill before 6PM and another two hours' worth of walking (much of it uphill over cobbled streets and lanes), I decided I'd better start orienting myself and locate the place where the tour was to start. Have I mentioned before that I have a terrible sense of direction and can easily get myself turned around and heading in completely the wrong direction? Anyway, I followed my map and found 1 Bellmansgatan (the site of Mikael Blomkvist's apartment) quite easily. And in that area were quite a number of pubs and cafés with outdoor patios. So I went to one that appealed to me, just a few doors away from no. 1 Bellmansgatan and ordered myself a glass of local beer so I could people-watch and browse through some of my purchases.

By around 5:50PM, I saw a woman standing next to a wall just by no.1, holding a clipboard and a stack of leaflets and other papers. It was indeed Eva, my tour guide. We chatted a bit about our favourite books and authors as we waited but by about 6:10, it was apparent that no one else was going to show up. So that was a surprise but a very pleasant one, as I had the luxury of my own private tour! She had lots of stories to tell about Stieg Larsson, his life and upbringing and family, his editorial work and political activism and efforts to understand the motivations behind some of the extreme right-wing factions that were gaining an alarming foothold in Sweden at the time. And that of course made for some serious threats to his life and his security.

She talked about Pippi Longstocking, the main inspiration behind Lisbeth Salander. I read the Pippi books as a child myself, as did my daughter and now my grandchildren. I reread them as an adult, in addition to several other Astrid Lindgren books for kids like the Kalle Blomkvist series (in the second-hand American editions I ordered through Abebooks, he was called Bill Bergson) and Mio, My Son. While in Sweden, I bought a couple more of the Astrid Lindgren books in English translation: Master Detective (published in the U.K. and in which Kalle Blomkvist was actually called that) and Karlsson on the Roof. Interestingly enough, my edition of Karlsson was translated by Sarah Death, who also translated Karin Smirnoff's The Girl in the Eagle's Talons, the latest book in the Millennium series.

There was ample time for the questions I had and Eva even took me to some spots that weren't part of the official tour. For example, the final stop before we parted at the metro station was rather a sad one: the grave of Michael Nyqvist, the actor who played Mikael Blomqvist in the movies, and who died in 2015.

As an aside, I had pretty much given up on reading the Millennium series after the first David Lagercrantz book, which I found somewhat disappointing. I was curious, however, about the new one by Karin Smirnoff and Eva said she thought that I would probably still enjoy it and be able to follow the characters and action, even without having read the rest of the Lagercrantz books. So I'll probably get a copy through one of my favourite independent bookstores and read it in the next few months.

As I did for 2020 and 2021, I once again kept track of the books I read in 2022. Once again, in defiance of all my librarian training, I have not listed them by author or title, but rather in the order in which I read them. I did, however, make one concession to categorization this year: I wrote "NF" beside all the works of non-fiction. As you will see from the list, about a third of the titles I read were non-fiction, many of them memoirs.


1. Eight Detectives - Alex Pavesi
2. Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne
NF 3. Bodies - Susie Orbach
4. The School for Good Mothers - Jessamine Chan
5. The Maid - Nita Prose
NF6. The Shitstorm that was 2020 - Jon Sinden & Mark Lim
NF7. The Hot Mess that was 2020 - Jon Sinden & Mark Lim.
8. Murder at the Seaview Hotel - Glenda Young
NF9. Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland's extraordinary women & how they are changing the world - Eliza Reid
NF10. The World of All Creatures Great & Small - James Steen
11. A Shetland Winter Mystery - Marsali Taylor
12. The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 - Richard Brautigan
NF13. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
14. The Christie Affair - Nina de Garment
15. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
16. The Girl Behind the Wall - Mandy Robotham
17. Something Lost: a mystery novel - Pat Duffy Hutcheon
18. Pluck - Donna Morrissey
NF19. The Informer: Confessions of an ex-terrorist - Carole de Vault with William Johnson
20. Looking for Jane - Heather Marshall
21. The Break - Katherena Vermette
22. A Thousand Steps - T. Jefferson Parker
NF23. Run Towards the Danger - Sarah Polley
24. Crispr'd - Judy Foreman
NF25. The Five Clocks - Martin Joos
26. The Strangers - Katherena Vermette
NF27. Forever Young - Hayley Mills
28. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie
NF29. The Case for Basic Income - Jamie Swift & Elaine Power
30. The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie
31. A Man Can Build a House - Nathalie Sedgwick Colby
32. Omand's Creek - Don Macdonald
NF33. Even the Sidewalk Could Tell - Alon Ozery
NF34. Beyond the Gender Binary - Alok Said-Menon
35. Hitman's Daughter - Carolyne Topdjian
NF36. The Film Club: A true story of father & son - David Gilmour
37. Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook - Celia Rees
38. Light a Penny Candle - Maeve Binchy
39. Murder in an Irish Village - Carlene O'Connor
40. The Happy Prince & Other Stories - Oscar Wilde
41. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats - T.S. Eliot
42. Queer Whispers: Gay & Lesbian Voices in Irish Fiction - edited by Jose Carregal (intro: Mary Dorcey)
NF43. We Don't Know Ourselves: a personal history of modern Ireland - Fintan O'Toole
NF44. Ireland, A Bicycle and a Tin Whistle - David A. Wilson
NF45. Country Girl: A Memoir - Edna O'Brien
46. Yeats is Dead: mystery by 15 Irish writers (editor Joseph O'Connor; benefit for Amnesty International)
NF47. Reel Ottawa: a memoir - Dan Lalande
48. A Noise from the Woodshed - Mary Dorcey
49. Dubliners - James Joyce
50. Curtain Call at the Seaview Hotel - Glenda Young
NF51. Sorry for Your Trouble: The Irish Way of Death - Ann Marie Hourihane
52. Romping Through Ulysses - Niall Laverty & Maite Lopez-Schroder
53. Deadly Director's Cut - Vicki Delany
54. Running Out of Road - Cath Staincliffe
55. Cascade - Rachel A. Rosen
56. Clouded Vision - Linwood Barclay
57. Metronome - Tom Watson
58. Bill Bergson and the White Rose Rescue - Astrid Lindgren
59. Donna Parker, Special Agent - Marcia Martin
60. I Married A Dead Man - Cornell Woolrich (William Irish)
NF61. Dublin's Literary Pubs - Peter Costello
NF62. Growing Up Trans: In our own words - edited by Lindsey Herriot and Kate Fry
63. Where The Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
64. The Sleeping Car Porter - Suzette Mayr
NF65. The Myth of the Wrong Body - Miquel Missé
66. The Foghorn Echoes - Danny Ramadan
NF67. A People's Senate for Canada - Helen Forsey
68. The Part-time Job / Murder Most Foul - P.D. James
69. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - Gabrielle Kevin
NF70. Not One, Not Even One: memory of life-altering experiences in Sierra Leone - Nancy Christine Edwards
71. A Line to Kill - Anthony Horowitz
NF72. 1963: The Year of the Revolution: How youth changed the world... - Robin Morgan & Ariel Leve
73. Dandelion - Jamie Chai Yun Liew
74. Blind Date - Brenda Chapman
75. 54 Pigs - Philipp Schott
NF76. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope & Healing in a Divided World - Katherine Hayhoe
77. The Wonder - Emma Donoghue
78. A Vicky Hill Exclusive! Hannah Dennison
79. Precious Little - Camille Fouillard
NF80. Trafficked - Sophie Hayes
81. Hope for the Innocent - Caroline Dunford
NF82. Wired for Music - Adriana Barton
83. Pawn to Queen: a Chris Prior mystery - Pat Dobie
84. A World of Curiosities - Louise Penny
85. Murder After Christmas - Rupert Latimer
NF86. Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age - Carl D. Marci
87. The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau - Graeme Macrae Burnet
88. Murder Most Royal - S.J. Bennett
89. A Spoonful of Murder - J.M. Hall
NF90. Becoming Eve: My journey from ultra-Orthodox rabbi to transgender woman - Abby Chava Stein
91. The Accident on the A-35 - Graeme Macrae Burnet

So that's my list. A handful of serious books, a couple of classics I've either been meaning to read for ages (or was prompted to re-read for various reasons). A few are kids' books. I don't think there were any really long books I read this year. Lots of crime fiction. Many are recent best-sellers.

Since today is Independent Bookstores Day, this seems like a good time to provide the second instalment of my Books Tour of Toronto. I did in fact visit a number of interesting independent bookshops during my brief stay in Toronto. Today, the Monkey's Paw bookstore, on Bloor Street West:

http://www.monkeyspaw.com

You won't find any recent mass-market bestsellers here! The place specializes in relatively obscure materials which nonetheless can be quite fascinating, at least to me. They're not necessarily expensive or valuable and at one time were not even particularly rare: think old dictionaries, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, old Girl Guide and Boy Scout handbooks or little booklets of recipes put out several decades ago by the makers of Jell-o or Baker's Chocolate.

I browsed the shelves at leisure and ended up selecting three that I wanted to buy, as follows:

1) Children's Games Around the World, by Jeanne Clarke Wood and Helen Clarke (Dietz Press, 1963).
The little card inserted in it by the Monkey's Paw aptly describes it thus: "An exhaustive study describing games from 56 countries and illustrated with hundreds of b/w photos". What is not mentioned on the card but becomes abundantly clear at even a cursory glance is that the booklet definitely reflects the social, cultural and political biases of the day, seen through an American and Christian lens. Fascinating, informative reading both on and between the lines!

2) The Pennsylvania German Dialect and the Autobiography of an Old Order Mennonite, by Allan M. Buehler, a resident of Cambridge, Ontario (c. 1977).
This seems to be self-published and yet it's a beautifully-bound, wonderfully eclectic hardcover book (it even has an ISBN). It contains a glossary with German, Pennsylvania German and English equivalents. It has Pennsylvania German proverbs and folklore and photographs, photos of traditional Mennonite clothing and churches and the author's ancestors, not to mention the author's life story (in English and Pennsylvania German) which included being excommunicated from an old-order Mennonite church for holding a seminar on some of the (at the time) newer developments in farm machinery.

3) The Practical Guide to Book Repair and Conservation, by Arthur W. Johnson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988).
The title really says it all. It's a slim, hardbound volume, just over 100 pages but containing many useful illustrations and diagrams as well as descriptions of bindings, adhesives, even pictures of the various bugs that might attack your books! Good for home use as well as for smallish libraries which do their own repair and restoration on-site, and who still like real books printed on real paper.

Having made my choices of books to buy, I decided to also buy a $4 token and try my luck with the Bibliomat. That's like a vending machine for books except that it's completely opaque so you don't know what you'll get. Here's what I got:

A Man Can Build a House, by Nathalie Sedgwick Colby (NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1928).

This is not a book I would generally have picked out at a second-hand book sale but as I was obviously fated to own it, I decided to give it a go. And I'm glad I did! While a man does indeed build a house in this book, the novel is really more about women than it is about men. Women being defined almost solely in relation to men. Women who marry for money, women who marry for love, women who marry or don't marry out of a sense of duty or who leave their men or who are widowed. People who rise above their "station" in life or who scandalize their neighbours and become social outcasts. Social class, masters and servants. Double standards abound.

The book centres on the lives of the owner and the employees of Kaufmann's, a huge department store in 1920s-era New York City. Cora considers herself to be a responsible, reliable worker. She "has a way with customers" and trusts it 's only a matter of time before Mr. Kaufmann recognizes the fact and rewards her appropriately. Ruby, on the other hand, is a lazy, common tart but a serious social climber and Cora has finally had enough. "It's me or her!" she tells Mr. Kaufmann. Kaufmann, who is well-meaning but clueless, agrees he must fire Ruby but somehow ends up marrying her. The story unfolds from there. In a way, it's like a good detective story, with the intersecting or clashing means, motives and opportunities of characters for doing the things they do.

At 355 pages long, the book has no chapter breaks although it is arranged in paragraphs of fairly normal length. The last quarter or so of the book was really quite gripping: I could foresee what had to happen but couldn't quite see how we'd get there! As a physical book, it's hardcover, nicely bound and in pretty good condition. Abebooks is selling a copy of it for $35.

I decided to look up a bit of information on the author and it sounds like she had a pretty interesting life. Here's one page I found:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/136875892/nathalie-sedgwick-colby

In my next instalment, I'll share more of my bookish adventures in Toronto.

Happy International Special Librarians Day (ISLD) everyone! It has been 30 years since the first ISLD was announced. For that occasion I, along with many other colleagues in my profession, got a special kit from the Special Libraries association. I still have some items from that kit, most notably a coffee mug from which I drank my breakfast coffee this morning. The pens have long since been lost, discarded or given away but I do still have one or two pads of the sticky-notes and pin-on badges from that kit.

Every year there is a slightly different theme or slogan - the first was "Information Beyond Borders: Building Global Partnerships" and had a globe logo which was on all the publicity materials. Later, the name of the occasion was changed to Information Ethics Day:

https://targetstudy.com/knowledge/day/238/international-special-librarians-day-information-ethics-day.html

The idea of information ethics struck me as being particularly important as I read the recent book by Richard Ovenden (director of the Bodleian Library at Oxford), Burning The Books, in which he looks at instances of the destruction (whether deliberate or otherwise) of human knowledge in the form of books, archival documents and digital files throughout history.

Earlier this week, final drawings are to be released for the new superlibrary - a combined Ottwawa Public Library and Library & Archives Canada to be built at 555 Wellington:

https://inspire555.ca/welcome

All of which brings me to the recipient of my donation this week, the LAC (Library and Archives Canada) foundation:

https://lacfoundation.ca/

Books and reading have played a huge role in keeping me semi-sane during the pandemic and the long stretches of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. I'm sure many, many people around the world feel the same way. So happy reading everyone, whatever your particular literary poison!

Apparently John Cleese wants to be buried along with all his unread books:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/books/review/john-cleese-by-the-book-interview.html

I wonder how that would work. Would there be a John Cleese Cryptic Memorial Library that people could actually visit? Specially sculpted bookends with hollowed-out interiors, each holding a teaspoon or so of his cremated remains?

More likely, I suspect, is that everything would be permanently encased in a very large coffin under Mount Cleese, entirely closed off from public viewing by those of us above ground.

I guess that's fine if you believe in an afterlife and can picture him living on in the underworld, happily enjoying his books. But we're a long time dead. Surely he would run out of reading material sooner or later?

For librarians and archivists keen to preserve our documentary heritage for posterity, it's a little depressing to think of somebody hoarding away the books he never had time to read, preventing anyone who COULD realistically enjoy them from doing so! Perhaps the family could compile a list of books being buried and maybe even retain digitized copies of some of them, particularly the ones that are out of print or utterly unique.

As I mull over how I could better organize my own personal library, I'm thinking about devising some annotations to explain why a few select books are particularly important to me or why they might be of particular interest to key people still here after I'm gone.

At my mother's final digs in a retirement residence, she only had room for one small bookcase. And yet, sometimes less is more. In a weird sort of way, I felt I gained a better understanding of her after she was gone, just from the limited choice of books she kept with her to the end.

I guess a lot of people have been working on fixing up their living-quarters since pandemic lockdown began. For some, that's been pretty much a necessity as their home becomes their office, the one-room schoolhouse for their kids, the entertainment centre, the workshop... and so forth.

I haven't done anything nearly that ambitious around here, but I have been doing a little reorganizing in the bedroom that our daughter occupied when she still lived here. The mattress on the Ikea bed in there was pretty much a write-off and we discarded it some time ago. When stay-home orders were invoked and we were perpetually at home anyway and suddenly had readier access to delivery services, I ordered a new mattress for it. I've also been removing the tired old wallpaper that used to cover one of four walls in there. It's not really the dry-strippable type but it does seem to be reasonably wet-strippable and I find it kind of therapeutic to listen to old music in there while I peel off old wallpaper. As far as the music goes, I have a kind of multi-use appliance in there now: it consists of a 3-speed turntable, CD player, and record-record function (by which I mean you can record from an LP or 45 or even a 78 if you still have them, on to a CD). It also has AM and FM radio. It doesn't play or record tapes, but I also have a portable cassette player in there. All of this is good since soon after lockdown, the amplifier in the living room died, leaving the CD player, turntable, radio and cassette player in there out of action. Components were considered the way to go back in the day when we first installed them, but I'm now mentally revisiting the merits of a self-contained console structure like I've got in my she-shed. Especially since I readily admit that I'm definitely NOT a techie (though luckily there's one in residence here!)

So yeah. I've always had a fondness for a lot my old LPs so there's nostalgia value right there. And there are a lot of kids' books (plus a few toys and games) still in there, including old Nancy Drews, Secret Circle and Enid Blytons, which ups the nostalgia value a bit more. I've weeded out some, of course, and have been sorting out the LPs too. It's great to see the vinyl renaissance since it means that those I DON'T want any more can hopefully live to see another day in another home. And hey, I just recently got an e-mail from Value Village to say that their Donation Centres are re-opening, albeit with reduced hours!

It's interesting to note that that bedroom has been used as a quarantine centre of sorts before. Five years ago, when my mother-in-law died and we decided to adopt her cats, we set up a temporary detention centre for them in there. This served to keep them apart from our existing feline in residence while we ensured they were in good health and their vaccine records were in order. Then we gradually integrated them into their new home and family and were able to enjoy their company for another couple of years.

Virginia Woolf wrote eloquently about having a room of one's own. This isn't the kind of Bluebeard's chamber or locked room of murder mystery lore but it does serve as a kind of oasis of childhood or youth when I want a break from the mundane tedium of everyday life!

This blog is 6 years old today. I started it on March 25, 2012 - also a Sunday. Is it living up to my expectations? That's something I'll need to reflect on a bit more but overall, I'd say yes.

Social media have exploded over the past decade and while some diehard Facebookies are threatening to cancel their FB accounts in the wake of the Cambridge Analytics scandal, I understand that that's easier said than done and I'll believe it if I see it. Meanwhile, I've bought myself one of those T-shirts that reads "Yes it's true - I'm not on Facebook!" And I can say with a certain amount of pride that it IS true. Meanwhile, I really like the whole idea behind Dreamwidth Studios and I plan to continue to support them, even if my blog entries are not as frequent as they used to be. There are still all kinds of nifty features to Dreamwidth accounts and I've barely scratched the surface in terms of exploring and experimenting with them. I'm also very confident with Dreamwidth that my personal data will not be sold and exploited for crass commercial and other nefarious purposes.

In my last entry, I described a recent haul from a second-hand book sale and while I'm looking forward to getting into them, they were temporarily put aside as I had quite a few library books on the go at the time. So in the remainder of this post, I'll write about my thoughts on those.

To My Trans Sisters (c2018) An "inspirational collection of letters written by successful trans women" sharing lessons learned on the journey to womanhood. Some of the characters I found sympathetic; others less so. After all these years, I'm still not so sure I understand the whole "trans" phenomenon, even though current thinking - by doctors, psychologists and the like - seems to be that those who feel they were born into the wrong sex or gender should be indulged to whatever extent they deem necessary for their mental health and survival! To me, you can be whoever you want in your fantasies so why should the outward manifestation be such a big deal?

So You Want to be a Robot: 21 short stories (c2017) - All written by someone who considers "themself" gender-fluid, they all deal to some degree with gender dysphoria and even species dysphoria. Heaven forbid we should all end up as cyber-people, but that's what some of the folk in these stories seem to want! Although it's certainly not MY fantasy, I nevertheless found the stories quite riveting!

The Importance of Music to Girls by Lavinia Greenlaw (c2007) - This was a kind of memoir of growing up in the UK and the important role popular music played in Lavinia's life. Born in 1962, she's a few years younger than I am but her descriptions of events in her life and songs with particular resonance for her nonetheless struck some responsive chords in me.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield (c2017) - A very thought-provoking book with chapters on all the technologies that are becoming so pervasive in our lives - 3D printing, Blockchain/Bitcoin, virtual and augmented reality, and what they do to our society in terms of social values and how we spend our time. While none of it was exactly surprising to me, it clearly highlighted the creepy Big-Brotherish and lack or privacy aspect to the world we live in today.

Murder in the Manuscript Room by Con Lehane (c2017) - This murder mystery takes place at New York City's 42nd Street Public Library, somewhere I've long wanted to visit, and features a librarian protagonist, Raymond Ambler. The murder victim is a recently-hired library employee reporting to Ambler's friend and fellow-librarian Adele Morgan, who seems very interested in an Islamic scholar working at the library (and whom many seem to have pegged as the perp).

Longing for Certainty: Reflections on the Buddhist Life by Nyanasobhano (c2003)

Older and Wiser: Classical Buddhist Teachings on Aging, Sickness and Death by Soeng Mu (c2017)

I borrowed the above two titles because I'm currently taking a Learning in Retirement course on Buddhism at Carleton. I have one more class (tomorrow) and then on the final day (April 9), we'll be visiting a Buddhist temple. I still haven't quite decided what I think of the material I've been learning. On the one hand, I think there's definitely a value to the whole meditating thing, especially in this age of social media and everyone being glued to their phones all the time. There are also definitely some positives to be had in the whole idea of accepting things as they are, with equanimity, as well as being less "grasping" and materialistic. But should we just abandon any thought of changing the world, or at least trying to get things to be more to our liking? And I don't know that I totally see craving as being a bad thing either - what Buddhism labels "craving" you or I might think of as having something to look forward to or to cheer us up! Is it really true that when you satisy a craving, you just crave more and more and it's always out of reach? I don't think that's how things are for me.

Anyway, those are just a few stray thoughts on what I've been reading of late. Now I've gone back to The Atheist Muslim (Ali Rizvi) and As the Years Go By: Conversations with Canada's Folk Pop and Rock Pioneers (Mark Kearney and Randy Ray). I'll probably put aside Simone de Beauvoir's Letters to Sartre while I indulge in Alan Bradley's latest Flavia De Luce mystery and Linda Wiken's Marinating in Murder.

Till next time!