I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do
Shopping for books is one part of Christmas that I really enjoy, and this year I found all the books I needed by walking between four bookstores clustered near the centre of town. At Manhattan Books I picked up two bright green hardcover copies of Bescherelle, L’Art de conjuguer (Éditions Hurtubise HMH Ltée), a nifty little guide to French verbs.
Like other unpublished novelists, I am always curious to read the new writers as they are “discovered” by the publishing houses. God help us if the people at Random House keep this up. Their latest “find” is David Eddie, whose novel Chump Change is a pedantic and tiresome glimpse at the life of a young male chauvinist lush.
By Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker and Irma S. Rombauer
Reviewed by S.K. Grant
In the Safeway today: shallots at $2.50 for a tiny string bag of three. The Prisoner of Shallot, I said, and thought I could remember the poem (Lord Byron, perhaps—one of the Romantics, surely). Why are shallots so expensive? No doubt a delicacy in some foreign land. Shallot is a pleasing word, mysterious and insouciant too. Later in The Joy of Cooking, I read: “The shallot is the queen of the sauce onions, and must be used with discretion.
NeWest Press does a better job with Diamond Grill by Fred Wah. Wah is one of Canada’s best contemporary poets but he is new to prose, and the appeal of a poet writing fiction is too tasty to pass up.
