Off the Page

It’s become a familiar cliché, a trope we’ve all seen all too often in movies, TV, and books... Strangely, though, when I was growing up, I was never, not once, asked to write an essay about what I did on my summer vacation. It would have been a pretty easy essay to write: as a kid, I spent my summer holidays exactly the same way I’m spending this one: reading. Sure, now I’m reading in my comfy chair in my office (usually with a cold beverage of the adult variety) rather than in a tree or in the hayloft (usually with a bag of penny candy from the corner store)—but the reading has remained a constant.

It’s the same way for independent booksellers across the country, including the five in this month’s installment. From a modern Canadian classic to a masterful YA book to a uniquely Canadian publishing situation surrounding one of the most controversial books in recent memory, the reading choices are as individual as the booksellers doing the reading.

And what are you reading as the dog days of summer set in?

And can I still get a little paper bag of penny candy anywhere nearby?

 *****

The Bookseller: Mary-Ann Yazedjian, Book Warehouse Main Street (Vancouver, BC)

The Pick: The Cure for Death by Lightning, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

This novel is destined to bec …

Summer.

The very word sends a shiver down the spine, carrying with it memories and echoes of those glorious months from our younger days when the world seemed limitless, and full of potential.

For readers, the summer months have a special connotation. We remember not family trips, per se, but those books we read wedged in the back seat. We remember not pick-up games in the yard, but library reading programs and the stacks of books we devoured, heedless of the outside world. (Did you cross an ocean, measuring the nautical miles in page counts? Or did your reading stats take you on an epic walk? Did you get stickers, or bookmarks, or was the reading simply for its own sake, with no thought of prizes?) We remember all that time we had to read what we wanted, not what we had to read for school. Summer is when we made some of the reading discoveries that have lasted for a lifetime, books and authors who would shape us, in ways we may not even really understand.

As exciting as summer is for adults, it’s never quite so wondrous as those we remember.

But as readers, we can recapture a bit of that magic, whether we’re travelling the world, or sipping coffee on our tiny deck.

This month, the booksellers of the Shelf Talkers column pull back the curtain a little to describe …