Cheesed off about book prices

I don’t want to get all bitchy or anything but I’m annoyed. Seriously annoyed.

For years Canadians have been paying more for the exact same book as Americans. I’ve heard all the reasons (and excused). Yep, the Canadian dollar sucked the big one for awhile. But for more than a year it has been consistantly strong, it’s been on par for ages and some days is worth even more than American dollar on the open market.

So it would greatly please me if publishers (who set the prices, not the booksellers) would stop sticking it to Canadians on book prices. I’m tired of it. Seriously tired with it. And I’m not even talking small amounts.

For example, John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines is coming out in paperback very shortly. Let’s two a tale of two Nerdfighters and please remember that the Canadian and American dollars are at par.

The American Nerdfighter goes to Amazon.com to order the book.

The Canadian Nerdfighter goes to Amazon.ca to order the exact same book.

If you clicked on the links you will see that the American pays $3.99 for the book where as the Canadian pays $9.00.

What if they want to also pick up his first novel, Looking for Alaska? The American will pay $7.99, the Canadian $9.99.

If they want to preorder his new book Paper Towns? Amazon.com price $17.99 marked down to $12.23 and Amazon.ca price $20.00 marked down to $14.60.

And no, it’s not just Green’s books. And Canadians have been paying more for books and magazines for years. What was the solution for some magazines? Remove the American price and just list the Canadian one so Canadians wouldn’t know they were paying more. I’m just tired of it.

To be fair there are some exceptions to the rule. Somehow Mudbound is cheaper in Canada that the US. Amazon.com price $15.61 ($22.95), Amazon.ca price $13.81 ($18.95).

What’s the solution for the Canadian book buyer? If we stop buying books we’ll be told the price is higher because not enough people are buying them. Ditto if we buy from an American bookseller. Me? I’ll be rocking the library and when I do need to buy a book this summer I’ll be shopping around for the best darn price I can.

The Day the World Came to Town

I don’t normally read books about September 11th. In fact I usually try avoid them at all costs. But Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town pull at me. I had known that a heck of a lot of planes got grounded in Canada that day. And I knew that a lot got grounded in Gander. But I hadn’t heard the stories.

Gander used to be a major stop for airplanes heading across the Atlantic. In it’s heyday it saw lots of planes, lots of celebrities. It was a major stop for Allied planes in WWII. It was a bustling airport. Bigger planes put an end to most of that. But on 9/11 it became a center of major importance. It could handle big planes. And it could handle lots of them.

It brought to the forefront things that I had never really considered about that day, like how the pilots and crew felt about hearing that planes had been used as weapons. How they felt in the air and how they felt afterwards. And I never really heard stories of the people that were stranded.

Having grown up in PEI I consider Newfoundlanders to be my neighbours. I’ve worked side-by-side with them in PEI fish plants and Newfies and Islanders share a lot of traits. They understand small towns. If they can help you they will without thinking twice about it. They are friendly. They understand how to take care of people. And on 9/11 and the days that followed the people of Gander and the neighbouring communities did it in spades.

Yes, it’s a 9/11 book. And yep you’ll want to cry. But it will also make you want to visit the Gander and give every single person there a big hug. And it makes you hopeful that you’d do the same thing, that your town would do the same thing, in a crisis.

Because All the Kids Are Doing It - The Big Read

Seen at too many blogs for me to remember.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (um…I’ve read some)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( I double underline 21 and 22???)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (confused…isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (do NOT want to read this one and would do so only under the threat of not having any other books available)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (started it and abandoned it)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (There’s a copy of our shelves that I did not buy and really don’t want to read)

71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I have it and am hoping to read it in French…hoping…)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (hmmm I might actually own this…)
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Geography Club

I’ve been wanting to read The Geography Club by Brent Hartinger for awhile. It’s YA, GLBT and it’s gotten good reviews. Unfortunately that whole not being part of a kick-ass library system for a year delayed it (*if* I ever move again I’m making sure I move someplace with a good library system, but I really hope not to do a big relocation again well…ever).

When I went to the library the other day it was actually on the shelf - I didn’t even have to request it. Score! So I picked it up and it turned out to be a pretty fast read. And it was good.

Russel Middlebrook is your average high schooler trying to navigate the often treacherous waters of high school popularity. Not a popular kid and not an outcast he’s doing pretty well. But there is one thing that makes him different - he’s gay. And no one knows.

At least not at first. But then he meets someone from his high school in an online gay chatroom. When they meet it turns out to be a popular boy…and a jock! Feeling a bit emboldened by this Russel comes out to one of his longest friends Min and it turns out that she’s bisexual and had a girlfriend that also goes to their school. Min’s girlfriend knows another gay guy that goes to their school too. The meet at a pizza place one night and bond over their secret lives. They decide to start a club at school - but not a gay-straight alliance. No one wants to be outed. So they start a club that they think is so boring no one else would want to join - a geography club.

I thought that the book was well done overall. My one and only complaint is where the heck were the parents? They weren’t even mentioned. I know that in high school (especially in a small town high school) being outed at school to your friends (and enemies) ranks really high up there for an in-the-closet GLBT teen. But most books also address the parent issue. Will they approve? Will they kick them out of the house if they find out? As much as teens may think that their parents are uncool and a pain in the ass they are still their parents and play a huge part in the teen years. To me it was a big hole in the story but don’t let that dissuade you - it’s a good book. And short (would have been good for the read-a-thon that I missed).

Something From the Oven

I finally finished Laura Shapiro’s Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. It feels like it took me forever. I was reading it at night before bed but then I went on vacation and didn’t take it with me and I’ve been tired as all heck since we got back and was falling asleep after a couple of pages.

Something from the oven looks at the rise of “convenience” foods after WWII and how they were marketed to women. And why, in a lot of cases they didn’t revolutionize women’s lives the way manufacturers thought they would.

It was interesting. Some of it wasn’t all that new to me, like the stuff on Betty Crocker since I’ve read Finding Betty Crocker. Ditto Julia Child because I’ve read quite a bit about her. I was surprised that there was so much about Betty Friedan in the book. It did made sense in context but I wasn’t expecting it.

Interesting stuff about some lesser known biggies in the food culture like Poppy Cannon and Freda De Knight. I don’t know much about either of them, especially Fredo De Knight but I think I might be on the lookout for more.

Interesting. People who have read a lot about the era probably won’t find a lot that’s new to them but a good intro for readers who haven’t. Great bibliography that’s not going to do nice things to my TBR list.

Library List edition #whoknows?

Somewhere along the line I really should have started numbering these. But for your viewing pleasure the current contents of Sassymonkey’s library shelf:

• Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the spy who ushered in the McCarthy Era by Lauren Kessler
• How to Pick a Peach: the search for flavor from farm to table by Russ Parsons (yes Andi, more food-lit - my food-lit pile has no bounds)
• Peasant’s Alphabet: more of the best from the Urban Peasant by James Barber (I reviewed his Cooking for Two on my other blog)
• Cool Kitchen: no oven, no stove, no sweat! by Lauren Chattman (I always leave the library with at least one cookbook)
• The Pink Ghetto by Liz Ireland
• Dedication: a novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (I wasn’t crazy about Citizen Girl but I’ll give them another shot)
• The Used World: a novel by Haven Kimmel
• The Professor’s Daughter by Joann Sfar & Emmanuel Guibert (I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this graphic novel for a while)
• Mudbound: a novel by Hillary Jordan (everyone seems to be saying good things about it)

Ok, let me see them. Where’s your library list?

The Off Season

Before I went on my vacation I downloaded the audio version of  Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s The Off Season from the library, stuck it on my MP3 player and then proceeded not to listen to a single word of it while I was gone. Figures doesn’t it? But after I got back I was tired (why is one generally more tired when they get back from vacation than they were before?) and had stuff to do so I threw on my headphones and listened away.

I really liked Dairy Queen so I wasn’t what to expect from The Off Season. Dairy Queen tied up fairly nicely - no cliffhanger type of ending. Actually I was almost a wee bit surprised that there was a sequel (I later read that she hadn’t originally intended for there to be one but her agent suggested since sometimes two books are easier to sell than one apparently).

So even if I say that I wasn’t sure what to expect can I say that this wasn’t what I expected? DJ is still pretty much the same character we meet in the first book. She grows up more in the second book, more than I expected given that she was a pretty “adult” teen character in a lot of ways. But when an accident strikes the family she steps up and grows up some more along the way.

I didn’t like so much how Brian’s character turned out. I did how Amber’s story arced. I was surprised about Curtis’s story. And I liked how there was more of the older brothers in this one. Was it as good as Dairy Queen? Honestly, probably not but it wasn’t bad. A bit too cliched in spots, a bit too unbelievable in others. But DJ was still DJ so I’m not complaining. It was a good sequel but not a particularly great one. But I think that Murdock has set herself up nicely for a third book should she ever decided to write one. If she did I’d read it.

Note on the audio book: the narrator, Natalie Moore, attempted a regional accent to make DJ sound more authentic. I originally thought it was going to be really annoying but I got used to it. I did find that sometimes it made DJ sound really young but then she is only supposed to be 16.

Non-book related post

So…I’m assuming you’ve all guessed by now that I’m a wee bit of a foodie. I even attempted a foodie blog for awhile but my heart wasn’t really in it. I still read lots of food blogs though and Food Blog Search is usually my first stop when I’m looking for a specific type of recipe to try.

Earlier this year Kalyn (of Kalyn’s Kitchen) posted about crockpotting at BlogHer. One of the blogs she linked to was A Year of Crockpotting. If you have a crockpot I highly suggest that you go read Kalyn’s post and then the Year of Crockpotting blog.

And if you do you will be able to read Stephanie’s post about how she and her blog got to be on the Rachael Ray show (whose name I always want to spell, and frequently do, as “Rachel”). Since I like to celebrate when blogs I read get some national tv attention I’ve decided I’m going to make one of her recipes tomorrow. I’ve decided on the Mac n Cheese recipe since we were going to make pasta tomorrow and I have all the ingredients (just be sure to read all the comments on that post, the recipe has been getting mixed results).

Anyone else want to play along? All you need is a crockpot!

Best of Food Writing 2007

I mentioned the Best of Food Writing series a few weeks ago in one of my library posts. Edited by Holly Hughes it’s been around since 2000 and until I picked it up off the library shelf I had never heard of it. But I’m happy I’ve stumbled upon it.

Each year a collection is published of the best food writing. In 2007 at least (I can’t vouch for the earlier years) that includes food blogs. Yay food blogs! Grouped together by a theme (Cooking at Home, World Food, etc) the articles form sections and are like tiny chapters (or sometimes not so tiny chapters).

I really enjoyed this and the shortness of most of the articles would make this a great selection to keep in your bag or car for when you are waiting in lines, etc or for those nights when you are tired and want to read but don’t want to get sucked into the plot of a story.

I’ll definitely be requesting the rest of books in this series from the library. I think I’ll work on them in reverse order rather than going back to the beginning and reading them in sequence.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy

Ack! I listened to this on audio before I went on vacation and then totally forgot about it and almost completely forgot to blog about it. I didn’t even add it to my book list. Bad Sassymonkey!

I’m very happy to say that Ally Carter’s second Cammie Morgan book, Cross my Hear and Hope to Spy was every bit as good as the first one.

In this one Cammie must deal with the fallout of her actions in the first novel, including a real interrogation by officials. School is mostly the same, with just a few minor adjustements…like Liz not taking cov-ops anymore. But don’t worry, Cammie finds a new cov-ops partner, Zac. Yes, a BOY. There are boys at Gallagher Academy this semester.

But Cammie feels like something isn’t right. Not right with the boys and not right with Zac. Can she trust him? Should she trust him? And can she trust herself?

Good sequel. So good that I’ve decided that I have to own these books eventually and I’m impatient for the next one in the series. Which, according to the author’s website, won’t be out until June 2009. sigh.

Notes on audiobook: Same narrator as the first one. Hopefully she’ll be around to do the rest. These are fun on audio and would be good car books. The only problem is that you sometimes don’t want to shut them off…