Ottawa Bookstore Wish List

My favourite thing to do in a bookstore… walk around with almost no money in my pocket (or bank account), pen and notepad in hand, writing down books for the wish list.  Here’s what’s on its way now, thanks to Chapters and the  Toronto Public Library!

• Momofuku Milk Bar, because it looked completely, irresistably delicious.  Even though I dislike non-kosher dessert cookbooks in general because it’s so hard to get some of the ingredients…
• Artisan Pizza and Flatbreads in Five Minutes a Day, by the authors of Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, my no-knead bible.
• My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, by Jim Lahey (can you tell what section I started browsing in???)
•  Good Eats 3: the Later Years, by Alton Brown (I like Alton Brown.  I’m sure some people DISLIKE him equally as much.  Far too precise for my tastes, but anyone who loves food this much can’t be all bad.)
• Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic, by Molly Caldwell Crosby
• Canadian Pie, by Will Ferguson – I didn’t know he had a new book out!
• The Virgin Cure, by Ami McKay

Finally, and predictably enough…

• Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson; not because everybody else is reading it, but because I picked it up and read a bit and it looks compelling enough to actually read.  And I read a review that said it was an extremely intimate portrayal.  And because, let’s face it, I was a fan of Steve Jobs way back around the Apple IIe, when nobody except me even KNEW who Steve Jobs / Wozniak was.  They are the same person, right???  YM took this picture of a big display of the book in Israel.

And then there are the TEEN BOOKS (is it wrong to love teen books at my age?)!  I find most to be a nice relaxing read that I can easily handle in the time I have to read on Shabbos.  So there!

• Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld, because I enjoyed the Pretties/Uglies trilogy, and even if I don’t like this book, maybe the big kids will…
• Sold, by Patricia McCormick (whoops – another teen book!)
• Smile, by Reina Telgemeier – a true story, a graphic novel, for GIRLS… sound perfect to me!
• The Death Cure, by James Dashner (this one isn’t mine; it was Elisheva’s request…”it’s by the author of The Maze Runner!”  okay, then…)

There are always a few odd books that the the library doesn’t have: :-(

• God, No – by Penn Jillette (drat! Don’t know what they have against him…)
• An Idiot Abroad, by Ricky Gervais (another silly-but-potentially-amusing book)

What I usually do for the ones the library doesn’t stock is find them on Amazon and then try to see if I can get something similar, or something by the same author.  So writing it down won’t have been a total loss.  Sometimes, I type the books in on Amazon anyway, just to see what else I can get.  A list of fifteen books can sometimes yield 30-40 library reserves, on a busy night.

And now I can go to bed happy, dreaming the happy sort of dreams that only come when lots and lots of books are drifting slowly homeward for Shabbos…