Books in the Bag: Conversion Trip

Finished Paddy Clarke: ha ha ha by Roddy Doyle, a Booker Prize winner for 1993, during trip to Calgary this weekend to attend Conversion; on the home stretch with Neil Miller's Sex-Crime Panic by alyson books and finished Sword of Shannara which I've been meaning to have a look at since I met and chatted with author Terry Brooks at a previous con. Started The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, bought Elisabeth Vonarburg's Dreams of the Sea and gulped down big meaty chunks of Samuel Pepys: the Unequaled Self by Claire Tomalin while driving home. Well, David was driving. Curious that I seem to be much better able to read in a moving car now, than I could when I was a child. Both the Pepys biography and Paddy Clarke came to me as gifts from David's half sister Katrina, along with a marvelous biography of the city of London, England, which I have only tasted so far. I am trying to weed books out of the house in preparation for renovations so I have many stirred up and out of place, bringing them to my attention afresh. I have been carrying around The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer for those five minute reading opportunities. Delighted to discover, at the con, that I can look forward to The Lateral Truth: An apostate's Bible Stories by Whinter Davis, forthcoming from a new small press called Green Magpie Press, operating out of Calgary. Even the Stones by Marie Jakkober was on sale at the Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy booth, at conversion, and I attended a reading from it by Marie. I have already read the book. Enjoyed the reading by Rebecca Bradley, author of the Gil series, of a pre-history work she is in progress with. The story features outcasts from a hunter-gatherer culture, in the aftermath of a plague. Bradley is an anthropologist as well as a talented writer, and makes both an entertaining and plausible go of it.