I probably should have mentioned this the other day, but there is one day left at the clearance book sale at the Toronto Reference Library (today from 9 to 4). Paperbacks are mostly $0.25, and trade paperbacks and most hard cover books are $0.50 (or 3 for a dollar). Pretty hard to beat those prices.
You have to go in with the right frame of mind, i.e. that you won't find a specific book (though the odds are slightly better if you are looking for a Canadian author) but there are lots of treasures amidst the piles and piles of books on the tables. I wasn't able to get there until 6 pm on Thurs. I didn't see a lot, but I did pick up a book of Robertson Davies's ghost stories and a book in the Vintage Contemporaries imprint (Crumley's Dancing Bear). I saw Choy's The Jade Peony, and that was tempting for less than $0.50, but it was very marked up and I decided to pass.
On Friday I went by on my way home from work and found a few other interesting books, including J.G. Farrell's Troubles (though not the NYRB edition) and Graham Swift (though now I am wondering if I own this already in a different edition). Actually, the most interesting is probably The Last Song of Manuel Sendero by Ariel Dorfman. (Whenever I do get to this one, I'll probably pair it with my rereading of Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, as there seem to be strong links between the two.) At any rate, I'll go through these books at the first opportunity, and then either donate most of them or perhaps put them in a Little Free Library. (I'm thinking of building one of these in the next couple of weeks, while I still have a power saw on loan.)
I believe that next weekend is a book sale at Victoria College, and I may drop by for that. Trinity's book sale isn't until mid Oct. It's been a while since I've made it to that one, and I might try to stop in.
In terms of actual book news, I keep going back to the NYRB site to see when Rezzori's Kain will be announced. At this point, it will have to be late 2019 or even 2020. (As it happens, this weekend I am tackling Rezzori's The Death of My Brother Abel.) However, I was very interested to find that Grossman's monumental Life and Fate is actually a sequel to a book (just as long) called Stalingrad, which has never been translated. Until now. NYRB will be publishing this next May. So I will pre-order that and then have the opportunity to read the series in the correct order (though probably not until 2020 or even 2021!). Anyway, this is one of the more exciting book announcements in recent memory. Hopefully it will make a bit of a splash.
Ok, I've got to run now (on the road to Stratford very shortly).
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