August 12 - Value Village

For $3.99 each, at my favourite scavenging site:
  • Charlie Connelly, Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast (which looks like a really fun nonfiction book, even though it's about a purely British phenomena, namely the BBC "shipping forecast," that I'd never heard of until today)
  • Amanda Hale, Sounding the Blood (set in 1915 at a whaling station in the Queen Charlotte Islands, plus she lives on Hornby Island, a place I visit regularly)
  • Barry Kennedy, Through the Deadfall (a novel about a project to link Vancouver Island to the mainland by bridge and tunnel)
  • Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (one of the great novel titles of the past few years, and the jacket claims it's "a charming comedy of eros")
And no, no, I haven't had time to go looking for green blogs to read....

Comments

Anonymous said…
The Shipping Forecast is a marvelous institution, I grew up in a house that had Radio 4 on much of the time (the station that broadcasts the shipping forecast), never particularly understood it as a child, but it was really quite hypnotically soothing, perhaps precisely because I did not fully understand it.

If you haven't already seen it, this page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/coast/shipping/index.shtml

has the forecast in text and a link to listen to it, which I would thoroughly recommend just to get an idea of its odd poetry.
richard said…
Yes, "poetry" is a word I'd use to describe the Shipping Forecast as well, now that I've heard it! Even "its odd poetry." Lovely.

Finally a good reason to consider going anglophile!

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