My favourite online booksellers, bookdepository.com, have just informed me that they are shutting shop at the end of this month. I feel a bit guilty about it because, although I regularly bought books from them, it seems it wasn't enough to keep them afloat.
Of course, no bookshop, brick-and-mortar or online, can compete against the many op-shops that offer books, sometimes beautiful hardcovers, and sometimes still in mint condition, for just two dollars.
We've just come back from town where we got our fifth COVID shot, after which Padma joined the mad Easter shoppers while I spent a couple of hours browsing through the books at Vinnies and the Salvos.
I came away with a brandnew hardcover of Tim Winton's "Island Home - A Landscape Memoir" - who'd buy such a beautiful edition for thirty or forty dollars and then abandon it at an op-shop? - a paperback copy of Andrew Fowler's "The War on Journalism - Media Moguls, Whistleblowers and the Price of Freedom", and "The Fall of Heaven", good background reading on my almost-forgotten and short-lived assigment in Tehran in 1976 just before the fall of the then Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
And, without wanting to prejudge V. S. Naipaul's book by its movie, I also picked up the DVD of "The Mystic Masseur" - see trailer below:
All we need now is a bit more sunshine and warmer weather and not too much boating traffic on the river, and we're all set for a Happy Easter!
