Books!

November has been an excellent month for me for book purchases, a strange oversight of mine given that I'll need to move the (heavy, bulky) things by the end of the year. I just really like books, I like owning books, I like reading books, I like spacing out just staring at my overstuffed bookshelves. Booksbooksbooks. Happiness.

Anyway [shakes head vigorously], yesterday I deliberately bought some books I'd been meaning to buy for a while. By "deliberately" I mean I stared at books on shelves at a Coles Books in a mall for about an hour, weighing options in my mind. Three books, for about $60, well over my normal price-per-book budgeting and buying.

I had a "magic card" for Chapters/Indigo (Coles is owned by that corporation), that only worked in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, that came in a flyer in the Globe and Mail a few days ago. Basically, 97% of these cards are worth $5 off a purchase of $50 or more (after discounts, before taxes), but small fractions of the total number of cards are worth more - $10, $50, up to $1000. So I talked myself into spending > $50 at Coles. My card, it turns out, was worth $5.

I'll review the books for "Book Club" here as soon as I read them - one of the underlying points of this particular purchase was that, since I'm paying full price for new books, I should get non-fiction that's really new. My usual acquisitions of non-fiction are either el cheapo as old, used books (typically >10 years old) or by pilfering my parents' supply of books-of-the-month-for-free club stuff in Calgary (which is where I found some real gems, like Guns, Germs, and Steel). The real target here, which I acquired, was The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. That's next up as soon as I finish my current non-fiction book.