Punk-Ass Book Jockey

I've worked at the bookstore for the last 12 days straight. Unlike last year, this year's bestsellers aren't quite as odd. They are diverse, though!

Our top sales slots go to:

1. Stoner by John Williams, first published in 1965, but mentioned in a Globe & Mail article a month ago, which means we can't keep it in stock. I sold 12 copies in 20 minutes on Friday!

2. Every Alice Munro book available, with a slight edge given to My Best Stories, a collection she picked for Penguin in 2009.

3. All three Ottolenghi books, and I am keeping the information that My Best Stories and Jerusalem: A Cookbook are actually the same book to myself, since no one else (including the North American publisher) seems to notice or care.

4. Joseph Boyden's The Orenda which, frustratingly, is out of stock until Random House can rush through another print run

5. The Luminaries

6. Hyperbole and a Half, which thrills me. Yay for Allie!

Two more days, you guys. Two more days and then I can collapse and cuddle babies and not worry about the bookstore for an entire blessed week.

Soooo... I may have gotten hold of an advance copy of John Green's A Fault In Our Stars, and I may have read it, and I may now be dithering with the need to taaaaaaaalk about it OMFG.

But I do not break book embargos and then also go spoil other people for details, so I'm sitting on my hands.

(Jesus, though! Really good! Yay for John, who can apparently do a teenage girl voice very well!)

(PS - You should go preorder it now. Or reserve one at your local bookstore.)

The book I am reading: Having Faith In The Polar Girls Prison by Cathleen With. This is an exceptional novel, about a Inuit teenage mom in juvie with her baby daughter, and I feel Viking kind of dropped the ball on promoting it.

The book I am writing: Oh god. There are many books I have started writing, and then stopped writing. They lurk menacingly on my hard drive.

The book I love most: Brilliant by Marne Davis Kellogg, in which a 50-something auction house manager by day, jewel thief by night gets into serious shenanigans. I've realized recently that my favourite books are all those in which the main character does their job really really well. Oh brain.

The last book I received as a gift: Nobody buys me books. :-( The downside to being a bookseller.

The last book I gave as a gift: Manfriend got a bilingual edition of The Captain's Verses by Pablo Neruda for Valentine's Day. Neruda likes boobies, I'll tell you what.

The nearest book on my desk: Mavis Gallant's Paris Notebooks, not to be confused with her Paris Stories. (The Notebooks seem to be inexplicably out of print.)

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is so fucking great, I can't believe it.

(Yes, that curse was necessary.)

I will offer more of a review once I've finished!

This weekend, the Toronto Women's Bookstore is having a "$10 for everything you can stuff into a paper bag!" sale. (I think they provide the paper bags. No, you cannot bring a Kraft yard waste bag.)

Deets here. It's limited to sale books (which, I assume, means stale-dated or remaindered), but their sale books are bound to be much more interesting than the sale books at my store, or at ChIndigo.

I was working through catalogues today, and had to enter a listing for a movie tie-in: "Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning" by Kevin Sullivan. I may have accidentally not ordered it. BECAUSE (( cut for bookish rantings )

Am sick.

Am listening to Pride & Prejudice and dosing myself with Buckleys.

Also, am mending socks.

Biggest waste of a weekend ever, y/y?

I am waiting for dude to come pick up my futon, and for dudette to come pick up my couch, and they are both running late, and for gods sake, how hard should it be to give furniture away?

Also, I have run out of boxes.

Also, part deux, I have too many books.

Also, part trois, can anybody explain to me how to get to HWY 404/HWY 7 from downtown Toronto, using public transit?

ETA: Yah! Futon is gone!

Due to the magic of del.icio.us, I discovered that various fangirls, with misguided good intentions, have posted online the entirety of several books by a Canadian kids book author... without the author's permission. And are planning to post more. And then to restart up a slash archive about the series.

I was shocked and then pissed and then I emailed the links to the author and to my sales rep at the publishing house.

I'm leaving names off of this post, because as interesting as it would be to point out who dunnit, I have no intention of helping other people find the illegally published online copies.

Since this is the age of sendspace and Googleprint, ( what I want to say to fandom is this: )

I'm supposed to be out having a life right now, so I think that's all.

Book Expo Canada's trade show started half an hour ago. Am supposed to be there. The desire for coffee + pancakes + fic first is stalling me, though... as is the thought of the hordes of junior Chapters employees roaming like a pack of wolves, ravaging the booths as they go. *shudders*

I am, however, looking forward to it, in a way that none of my colleages seem to do anymore. This is only my second BEC, though; maybe number five is where you start hating it.

Also, I need a bookseller-ing icon.