Last week CW and I went to Value Village to look for some books for him. Value Village has secondhand books priced on a sliding scale which depends on the original cover price. All hardcovers at $3.99, and then fiction paperbacks that were originally $8+ are sold for $4.99, anything that was $6-8 is now $3.99 and so on and so on. Children’s books and non-fiction are flat prices. Sometimes you can get a good deal.

My only beef with the system is downstairs (where the books are at my local Value Village) the signage says, “Buy 3, Get The 4th Free” but upstairs at the till (for the employees) it says, “Buy 4, Get the 5th Free”. They didn’t believe me and although I am stubborn enough to make a staff member go check, there were other people in line so I didn’t push it. We had four books (I had three, CW had one) and the people behind us at the till had one. They suggested we get their book for free and they would give us $5 for it. Problem solved.

Now, the books. CW got a copy of Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind, the first book in the Sword of Truth series. This is his favourite series and we each have a copy of the entire series (his is in England, mine is here). We also have several extra copies that CW likes to lend to friends but the first book in the series is MIA.

I picked up three books: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards; Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant; and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean.

Why did I pick up these books? I heard good things about The Memory Keeper’s Daughter when it first came out. Come, Thou Tortoise is the first novel by Canadian author Jessica Grant, and was getting gushing reviews. Also, she just won Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award. I am a big Stuart McLean fan and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe is one of the (few) Vinyl Cafe books I don’t yet own.

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