July 27 - Chapters & the village

A quick visit today to perhaps the least bookish bookstore I ever go into, and it's pretty rare that I go: Chapters. If my daughter hadn't gotten a gift certificate for her birthday, well, I wouldn't have bought:

• Nick Jans, The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears ($6.99: probably a good pickup, since I'm supposed to be teaching animality in January), and
• Norah Vincent, Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin ($5.99: I apreciated her Self-Made Man we read for the book club last year, even if I wasn't entirely sold, and this one should avoid the awkward gender issues that didn't work for me, as well as looking even more like Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).

And then for $2.99 later on at Value Village, I picked up Ted and Stanley Czolowski's classic wee book (mostly pictures) The World of Stanley Park. A nice example of how one looked at nature in 1974, I'd say!

Fun (?) fact: the Stanley Park Zoo began life as "little more than one bear chained to a tree stump" (p.60). Whoa.