October 25 - Munro's

I rarely get to downtown Victoria, but Munro's Books will always be one of my very favourite bookstores. Their selection is almost always very good, especially for readers of literary fiction and interesting nonfiction, but their remainder tables are exceptional. I carried half a dozen books around with me, but in the end I left with only two, each for $5.99:

• Mark Obmascik, The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (in the US there's an annual yearlong birding marathon, and in 1998 Obmascik tracked three of the more obsessive competitors as they covered - UNBELIEVABLY - 275,000 miles), and
• Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitats of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (he spent a year of nights on a camp stool in an alley off Wall Street, watching rats; he also researched them extensively, but I wanted it for the ethnographic elements).

People are strange, bless 'em.