The Wilds of Nova Scotia. With Books!

Yesterday, Deva and I had planned to go to Frenchy's, a secondhand place I've heard much about since moving here but never visited (I should clarify, Frenchy's is actually a chain, not a single store). We thought we might also make a quick stop at Value Village and perhaps Chapters, and then grab some groceries on the way home. After visiting the Frenchy's in Sackville, where I got a gorgeous velvet scarf for $1.50 and a couple of tops for work, we got back on the road and the conversation turned, as it often does when Deva and I are in the same place, to books. Somehow Wolfville (home of Acadia University) also came up, and I mentioned a bookstore I'd seen in the phone book that looked intriguing. Deva thought it might be a shop she remembered, and so we decided, what the hell, and drove out to Wolfville (in a car borrowed from Judy, Deva's mom).

Said bookstore, The Odd Book, turned out to be as wonderful as I'd hoped (though the "books about books" section was a bit of a disappointment). They had a lot of obscure old stuff for reasonable prices (plus a few things I though were priced a little on the high side). When we pried ourselves away from the books, we each had a substantial stack and had decided that semi-regular trips to book shop might be a good idea. Here's what I ended up with:

• Edwin Mulhouse by Stephen Millhauser -- fiction by the fellow who wrote the short story that the movie The Illusionist was based on (fine movie, too)
• Martin Dressler by Stephen Millhauser -- yeah, same guy; I've been devouring his short stories, and so decided to tackle his novels
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris -- one to add to my atheist library; it was on my list of things to look for specifically
• The Great Houdini by Williams and Epstein -- for my research on the history of magic that will eventually result in a novel
• Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World by Jeremiah Curtin -- for the fairy library; I'm not sure if I used this one in my thesis--if not, I should have
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin -- finally my own copy; I've been reading Darwin's Ghost by Steve Jones, which is sort of an updated version
• Issues in Science and Religion by Ian G. Barbour
• The Death of Adam: Evolution and its impact on Western thought by John C. Greene

So, lots of fabulous things to read.

And I have much more to write about, such as Sue's visit, my birthday (plus thanks to gift-givers), and my thoughts on the two new blogs listed to the left (Deva's and Ryan's, for which I am sort of responsible), and the change in appearance of this very blog.