Read This . . .

Jools and I went to St Catharines (close to Niagara Falls) for a giant book sale at the huge Book Depot. Never seen so many books before - thousands and thousands of them. Fill a box for $40. How many did we buy? Precisely zilch. The books are publishers overstocks with, it seemed, loads of discards of thick volumes written by US warmongers and various rightwing chuckleheadss, with special attention to Bill O'Reilly's gang at Fox News, and more fawning hagiographies of Ronald Reagan than I've ever seen gathered under one roof.

Subject-matter aside, the line-up for the cash registers was half an hour long, so we fled and drove to the city's wonderful Write Bookshop on the almost deserted main street - the town has yet to recover from the closure of the General Motors plant a few years back - with two floors of books piled almost floor to ceiling in a maze of shelves under dim lights. Wonderful . . .