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So on Wednesday, I went to Toronto for a few literary activities. I had signed up for a lunch and tour on the Thursday with some of my Ex Libris Association colleagues, centred around the Yorkville area.

My train actually arrived ahead of schedule to a beautiful sunny, warm day and as it was still too early to check into the hotel, I took the subway all the way up to Davisville and went for a walk along Mount Pleasant Road to the recently-opened Inhabit Books. It's quite small but very inviting, with an excellent selection of both adults' and children's books in both English and Inuktitut. But conscious as I was that I would have to lug any books I bought back to Ottawa, I tried very hard to limit my choices!

I ended up buying: an Inuktitut-English dictionary; a beautifully illustrated children's book called The Other Ones, by Jamesie Fournier, illustrated by TomaFeizo Gas; Elements, a bilingual book of poetry (Inuktitut on one side of the page spread, English on the other), also by Jamesie Fournier; and a memoir by Larry Audlaluk, What I Remember, What I Know: The Life of a High Arctic Exile.

Did I mention that Inhabit is not just a bookstore but also a publisher? For more information, see www.Inhabitmedia.com

By then it was late enough to check into the hotel, so off I went back to the subway. It was also getting into rush hour and as I got into the train, one leg gave way beneath me and momentarily got wedged between train and platform before somebody helped me to un-jam my foot, thereby averting what could have been a major disaster! I assured the nice young man that I didn't need any first aid or other medical attention and after a couple of minutes' delay, we were all on our way.

I checked into my hotel without further mishap and spent the evening unpacking, relaxing and watching TV.

The Ex Libris activities on Thursday involved lunch at The Pilot, followed by visits to the Metro Toronto Reference Library and the Yorkville Public Library in the afternoon. But before meeting the others for lunch, I had time to stop into Glad Day Books on Church Street, grab a coffee and browse their collection.

I really love that area of Toronto, although unfortunately the weather wasn't as great as the day before. Still, I saw some people I hadn't seen in years. We had our own separate room at the restaurant too, which facilitated conversation.

Late afternoon saw me heading back to my temporary home base, where I had a light snack and changed into some warmer clothes before heading out yet again into a rainy evening.

It was purely by chance that my visit to Toronto coincided with a double book launch by BookHug press at Type Books on Queen Street West. But I decided it was an opportunity not to be missed.

The book that really intrigued me was Blue Notes, a thriller by Anne Cathrine Bomann, a Danish psychologist and novelist who was in Toronto for the launch of the English translation of her book. It centres around the idea of prolonged grief as a form of mental illness. And what if a pill could be developed to "cure" people of that grief? In the book, a fictional pharmaceutical company claims to have done just that, trials are conducted and analyzed at a university and one of the researchers looking at the statistics notices what look like some disturbing side effects in those who have benefited most from the drug. The basic question it raises: in overcoming their grief, have these patients lost their capacity for empathy and even veered into psychopath territory?

I mostly read the book on the train trip back to Ottawa on Friday, finished it yesterday, and found it absolutely gripping!

The other book being launched (or actually re-launched in an expanded version) was a book of short stories called How You Were Born. That too sounded interesting and I may try to get hold of it at the library.

Overall, it was a fascinating two-day getaway.

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.

On June 5, 2012, I wrote about having been in the wrong place at the right time, also in regard to a trip to Toronto. I relived that sensation last week - although this time the tragedy occurred in Ottawa.

Last Monday, I took the 8:30 train to Toronto for my Ex Libris board meeting, which was on Tuesday. I stayed an extra day and night, returning to Ottawa on Thursday on the 4:20 PM train - which I selected deliberately as it normally is a non-stop trip from Toronto Union station to Fallowfield (ending at the main Ottawa station) and takes slightly less than four hours for the complete trip. This time, however, we were only able to go as far as Brockville by train and then had to board one of three buses - to Ottawa's main station, the Barrhaven (Fallowfield) station, or Dorval/Montreal. Which meant arriving over an hour late. If I'd waited till Friday to go home, I could have gone the entire way by train. And yet, if I'd gone two days later, it would have been so much worse.

News of the catastrophic bus-train collision that killed six people (and a number of others may still be hanging on by a thread) was all over the news on Wednesday - not just in Ottawa but also in Toronto, Niagara and no doubt elsewhere. Even the much-maligned Toronto mayor was making all the right noises, extending sympathies and offers of assistance (whatever that meant) to Ottawa and Ottawans. Of course, there were probably quite a lot of Torontonians on that train too! As a train passenger, I probably would not have been injured even if I'd taken the Wednesday train - physically, at least. The psychological and emotional turmoil, however, would have taken considerably longer to overcome! I do know people living in Barrhaven; I think I may even have met at least one of the people who died, though I certainly didn't know any of them well.

So where should we go from here? I'm not sure if we'll ever know quite what caused the crash. But additional safety measures could certainly be implemented. I think an overpass or underpass is definitely in order, although that obviously can't be built overnight. Meanwhile, I'm wondering what numbskull decided that trains mustn't blow their whistles at certain times of day - funny that the City can get exemptions to allow construction noise at Lansdowne Park at 3AM but trains aren't even allowed to blow their whistles in the suburbs of Ottawa during daylight hours!

Should the number 76 be retired? Although I have the utmost sympathy for the people involved in the disaster, I vote no on that one. The gesture would be at best symbolic. It's confusing enough when buses change their numbers without substantially changing their routes (as, for example, when the 71 became the 86 or the number 53 was used for a new route that was nothing like the old 53 route). And it's not like hockey or other sports players where a specific number corresponds to a particular person: there must have been dozens of people behind the wheel of the 76 over the years it's been in existence.

I still think that on balance, train travel is very safe. But that doesn't mean we should get too complacent, as this episode makes clear.

This past weekend, I was in Toronto for the Bloody Words mystery conference. As many people are aware, Toronto was an eventful place to be.

I took the 8:30 train Friday morning from Ottawa, arriving in Toronto around 1PM. If I had gone down Thursday morning instead (as most of the Ottawa-based members of Crime Writers of Canada did), I would have had to take a bus to Brockville to get a train the rest of the way. But by Friday, CP workers had been legislated back to work so the VIA trains (which use CP tracks between Ottawa and Brockville) were able to run normally.

The train got to Toronto more or less on time, and I was just a short walk from the hotel where the conference was to be held. Had it been an hour late or so, I would have been caught in the flood - Union Station was transformed into a sewage-plagued swimming hole when construction workers severed a water main on Front Street, and the subway station was out of commission altogether.

The weather was chilly and rainy however, so after checking into my hotel I decided it would be a good afternoon for indoor activities. I wandered up to the Art Gallery of Ontario to see the Picasso exhibit and a few of the permanent exhibits (Emily Carr and Group of Seven). Then I headed back to College Street and the Lillian Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library, where I visited the Osborne Collection of children's literature and the Judith Merril science fiction collection (formerly known as the Spaced Out collection). I was back at my hotel in time to watch the news and see some incredible pictures of Union Station, and then watch Frank Foster get murdered on Coronation Street, before attending the first panel of the evening.

The main guest authors at the conference were Gayle Lynds, author of the Book of Spies, a mystery about the secret Library of Gold under the Kremlin; Linwood Barclay, who has written numerous bestselling thrillers; and Rick Blechta (who writes mysteries with musical themes). But there were many of my favourite authors there, including the usual Ottawa contingent, as well as some I had not heard of before but who will doubtless join my list of favourites.

Saturday morning I attended three panels, then left around noon for an extended lunch break and a visit to the Sleuth of Baker Street bookshop. As the next event I wanted to attend did not start till 3:30, I returned by way of the Eaton Centre food court where I stocked up on a few edibles. Of course, we all know what happened there just a few short hours later!

Saturday evening was the conference banquet and awards presentations and Sunday morning, I went to a presentation of a play: The State of New York vs. Peter Pan. It had originally been written and performed as part of a Fringe Festival and was really very funny. Tinkerbelle clearly isn't as naive as she looks (Disney might want to reconsider using her to introduce their show) and pixie dust should definitely be a controlled substance!

I had decided to stay over Sunday night as well, since I always find it a bit of a rush to get checked out of my hotel on a Sunday morning. So I had Sunday afternoon to wander about the city. I crossed York Street over to Harbourfront, browsed the museum of Inuit art at the Queen's Quay Terminal, and returned over to the east side of Front Street, ambling about the antiques stalls in the St Lawrence Market area. I went to Nicholas Hoare Books (soon to be the last in the country, if it isn't already), then up to Queen Street and back to my hotel. I had hoped to go into Indigo books but like the rest of the Eaton Centre, even with its separate entrance, it was "closed until further notice". I even managed a dip in the hotel pool. It would have been tempting to try to get tickets for the ballet version of Hamlet, which was playing at the centre right near the hotel, but by then I was rather tired and wanting to get packed and organized for my departure on Monday.

And so I survived my extended weekend in the big city, with lots of good reading ahead of me (and plenty of fodder if I ever get around to writing a crime novel myself!)