Oct 7 - United Way

Stupid charity booksales. I mean, they drag down the profit margin of second-hand bookstores, unless the booksellers show up to clean the place out themselves and so take the profit for themselves; they hit at purveyors of new books as well; and there's no cut heading the direction of the authors from them, either.

I've tried to swear off them before, but ... stupid booksales. This week, the United Way has taken over part of UVic's McPherson Library, and in consequence I've lightened their load by 23 books at a toonie apiece:

• Luanne Armstrong, The Bone House (an environmental justice / global warming novel set in BC)
• Philippe Bourseiller, 365 Ways to Save the Earth (a stunningly photographed and appallingly self-congratulatory chunk of decadence appropriate to the last days of Rome)
• Ivan Doig, The Whistling Season (a Montana novel, 1909)
• J. Claude Evans, With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World (existentialism meets environmental ethics -- I think)
• Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
• Kitty Fitzgerald, Pigtopia (the novel of a man who's been born with a disfigurement and spends his time with pigs -- "a species-bridging combination of animal intuition and human wisdom," says Salon)
• The Fraser River (a 1979 "special publication of Beautiful British Columbia magazine")
• ed. Dennis Gruending, The Middle of Nowhere: Rediscovering Saskatchewan
• ed. Daniel Halpern, On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History (a classic 1987 anthology)
• Roy Kiyooka, Pacific Rim Letters (ed. Smaro Kamboureli)
• Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, The Lovely and the Wild (a mostly self-taught naturalist's life in Ontario's Pimisi Bay)
• Adam Lewis, Sockeye: The Adams River Run
• ed. Emilio F. Moran & Elinor Ostrom, Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Human-Environment Interactions in Forest Ecosystems (a little light reading from MIT Press)
• Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing
• Henry Petroski, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (yeah, I don't know why either)
• Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
• Helene M.E. Schalkwijk-Barendsen, Mushrooms of Western Canada
• Sierra Club Books, Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness (both volumes, naturally. Sigh)
• Joan Skogan, Voyages at Sea with Strangers (memoir of a fisheries observer on non-Canadian boats off the West Coast)
• Craig B. Stanford, Chimpanzee and Red Colobus: The Ecology of Predator and Prey
• Aaron Sussman & Ruth Goode, The Magic of Walking (front cover: "The most complete guide ever published to the joys of walking--for pleasure, for health, for serenity--in city, in country, in America and abroad. Plus a glorious ramble through the literature of walking")

Did I already say, stupid charity booksales?