There they were

I was busy doing  the first major grocery shopping of 2011 at Costco yesterday and as usual, I strolled though most of they aisles just looking.  So many thing.  Such big piles.

I particularly like to wander down the book aisle.  All the hot hit books, all the big fiction is there, every self help book that any one ever needed is near, all the pop psychology.  Piles and piles of books.  I'm a picky reader, and I have a very hard time paying full price.  To me, though interesting, it was all just a big pile of stuff.  

And then I saw them.  Two awkwardly placed small piles tucked on top of a pile of cookbooks, placed between more cookbooks.  There they were.

'Blood and Iron, Building the Railway' by Paul Yee,  the fictional memoir of Lee Heen-gwong in BC in 1882 and 'Prisoner of Dieppe, World War II',  by Hugh Brewster, the fictional memoir of Alistair Morrison in Occupied France in 1942. They were both published under the header of I AM CANADA by Scholastic Books.  

Every Canadian kid who went to school the last 40 years knows Scholastic, publisher and seller of young adult and children's fiction. They were the company of school book fairs and monthly fliers of kids books that you would take home and then try to talk your parents into getting s couple of books.  My kids always got books. I am a sucker for the owning of books.  

But these are not just young adult fiction. These are not just the realm of Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket. These are so much more.

These are Canadian stories.  Canada has always suffered from this odd little complex of talking big about the little things and little about the big things, but we seldom told our own stories.  In my lifetime, I have seen it change.  The best and the brightest of our literature are distinctly Canadian stories and it is very thrilling to me that it reaches into young adult fiction too. We are a nation just bursting with stories and it is time to do the tell.

I'm not going to lie by omission and not tell you I am also delighted to have some light reading for NaJuReMoNoMo.  I am.  Seriously delighted to have some interesting books that are not 800 pages.  Delighted that they are books, not ebooks.  They might be kid lit, but they are well written and so far, the Dieppe Story is excellent.  

Oh, and while moving books on the book case to dust, I realized I never did get round to reading 'Solomon Gursky Was Here'.  Five chapters into that one too. 

In the battle for supremacy between books and ebooks, books win.  At least in my house they do.