The Shelf Life: Champaca Bookstore Blog — recommendations

In Peter Swanson’s Rules for Perfect Murders, a bookseller idly recommends a few of his favourite crime reads on the bookstore blog. Years later, a detective shows up at his door: she’s looking for a serial killer, who appears to be killing people in the same style as the “perfect murders” on his blog post. 

We don’t want to inspire a serial killer — but we were inspired to put together some spooky recommendations for you, and October seemed the perfect time to do that.

Our favourite part of our little bookstore (other than the books!) is our visiting cat who pops by to say hello and demand food. We often see her sunning herself on our roof, with just her tail hanging over the edge!

Have you ever wondered why cats love bookstores? Jason Diamond traces it back to ancient Egypt, when cats were revered (and some cats still act like they’re royalty!). Cats were trained to protect papyrus rolls from being eaten by pests. Over the years, they were kept around libraries and bookstores, trained to protect books from mice, rates, lizards, you name it! Our little cat comes from a long history of indie-bookstore felines.

This month, we’ve put together recommendations for cat-lovers, across poetry, graphic novels, science, and fiction. Read on for our recommendations, and find them on our online store!

In her book Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression, bell hooks says that feminism is a thing you do (“I support feminist action”), and not a thing that you are (“I am a feminist”). This idea asks us to think: if feminism is action and not identity, how do the social structures in which we live impact our lives? What things can we do to make a better future, and what concrete actions can help us get closer to that future? 

We’ve put together a collection of feminist writing that explore the intersection of feminism with race, caste, and class. In this list are memoirs, ethnography, biography and poetry. 

We hope you will enjoy reading these books. Find them on our online store.

Across the world right now, questions of freedom, citizenship, and human rights are reverberating. Race and racism are now central to many of these conversations, found in everyday instances of lived experience and embedded in societies and institutions as a whole. This month, we’ve compiled recommendations that speak to the experience of racism and the insider-outsider paradigm. We have chosen fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry that  talk of immigration and race in many of its forms. We find these books illuminating, at times heartbreaking and hopeful. We hope you like them too.

Find these books on our online store.