I’m back from another trip to Vancouver, this one organized mostly around the festivities for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. It was glorious weather the entire week, which was an especially good thing for the big party — a great event featuring family, old friends, lots of food and wine, and four musical performances from Bulgarian dance music to Bartok violin sonatas.

This was a shorter trip than my last one and involved quite a few family events, so I didn’t get around the city quite as much or see as many of my own old or newer friends (sadly, including Liz, with whom I had such a delightful lunch last year). Next time! But the city was as breathtakingly, unbelievably beautiful as ever:

And my parents’ garden was as tranquil as ever, with its colorful pots, shady trees, and soothing “gurglers”:

 And Granville Island (my happy place!) was as bustling and tempting as always:

And, of course, there’s always time to do a little book shopping:

My mother and I went on our traditional outing to Hager Books, which is small but nicely ‘curated’ and so always has particularly tempting options. I bought something old (Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence), something new (Jumpha Lahiri’s The Lowland) and something that’s a bit of a gamble (Zoë Ferraris’s Finding Nouf, a mystery set in Saudi Arabia which, if it turns out to be well-written and smart, is a possible contender for my detective fiction class — I’m always on the hunt for books that offer a different perspective or use the form for different kinds of inquiries — we’ll see how it goes).

I picked up Heyer’s Friday’s Child at Carson Books, a used book store in my parents’ neighborhood. It’s a fun place to rummage around, though overall the prices strike me as a bit high for second-hand. This is a pristine copy of a Heyer I’ve never read, though, so I snapped it up. I also bought an Inspector Morse novel there, because something about being around my folks always reminds me that I haven’t read any of these (they are big Morse fans), but I started it and wasn’t grabbed, so I left it behind for them to enjoy. (I’m sure my Morse days will come: for my sins, I’m unmoved by the TV show as well. In the meantime, though, I may try the prequel show Endeavor, which they all highly recommended.)

And then at the big Chapters downtown (which, once you get up to the third floor, past all the frou-frou stuff that comes first, has a pretty big selection of actual books) I found two books from my standing wish-list: E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (because you can never have too much British social satire in your collection) and Harry Karlinsky’s The Stonehenge Letters — contemporary Canadian, so a bit of a rarity and a risk for me, but recommended to me by Steven Beattie, who knows a thing or two about Can Lit. I gave it a good look in the store before deciding to actually buy it, and I like his instincts: it looks meta-historical and original, but not so quirky I either won’t get it or won’t like it.

Now I have to get myself re-organized and on track for what remains of the summer!