Back From Vacation

Well, after two weeks in Europe I'm back in Canada.  And it feels good to be home.  We had a rather insane (planned by me) itinerary, where we did rather more cities than we should have in a short amount of time.  The downside of that is that I'm exhausted and didn't get any reading done on this trip.  The upside is that I took a ton of great photos and got to see a lot of amazing places (some for the second time).

Here are some of the photos I took (click on the photo to go to my Picasa album).  Don't worry, this is a 'best of' collection, not all 3000+ photos from my trip.

Germany/Switzerland 2012

One thing I am interested in, as a bookseller, is the selection and price of books in other countries.  Specifically science fiction and fantasy books.  So I checked out a few bookstores (mostly in train stations and the airport).

Here are some pics.  First, Bern.  Decent selection of books.  But wow!  Look at that price.  That's Brent Weeks' Way of Shadows in trade paperback on sale for chf 27.50 (that's $29.30 Canadian).  Take that, people who complain about Canadian book prices.

Germany isn't much better for price.  Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, also available in trade paperback, is 20.60 ($26.30 Canadian).  Remember that the price involves the translation.  I didn't think to check the price of an untranslated work.  The selection here included some manga at the end.  It looks like a lot of books, but they're all faced and there are multiple facings for some books, so there aren't really as many books as this photo suggests.

I started reading J. M. Frey's Triptych in the airport in Toronto, but my reading became so disjointed, and the prose is so good, that I've decided to start the book again and read it properly, now that I'm home.  I saw a bunch of movies on the flights, so you can look forward to some more current movie reviews as well.