Liberated from the 2005 Victoria College (University of Toronto) booksale for $1

RELEASE NOTES:

On the leave-a-book-take-a-book shelf.

As for reviews:
I enjoyed this collection, although not as much as The Progress of Love which I'd read earlier, but this is an earlier work, so that's not a real disappointment. Unfortunately, this copy was published, it appears, when Munro was still taken to be in the genre of "women's literature", or at least the publisher takes her to be such, rather than as the staple of Canlit and winner of a Governor General's Award which she is. One could deconstruct the notion of women's literature (as opposed to men's literature?), but the look and cover of the book and the chosen reviews ("Fiction that probes the inmost depths of the female heart...", "Girls and women experiencing love in all its many forms, life in its beauty and bewilderment", etc.) and the many typos suggest that the publisher did not take her particularly seriously. The implicit classification of the book conveyed by its cover is likely to turn some more serious readers of both genders off of it. (I often found myself slightly embarrassed while reading it in public, especially when someone read the title "How I Met My Husband" over my shoulder and asked if I thought I needed instructions.) However, I did find it to be worthwhile literature, and see no real reason for such a classification. Munro's work often comes off as very feminine in some sense, very distinctly from a female point of view (at least within our society) and I do find that it can get tiresome at times (I put both this collection and The Progress of Love down partway through, but the short story format makes it easy to pick them up again), but I see no reason why such a point of view deserves to be marginalized, is somehow less literarily legitimate. None of the stories except "The Found Boat" struck me as any sort of romance, let alone escapism (and I felt that this story was the only real failure in the collection), and others, like "Walking on Water" contained no romance at all. The themes of generational tensions and cultural differences between the rural and the urban are much more prominent, and, as in The Progress of Love, the theme I found most prevalent and most compelling was the examination of the lives and experiences of people who seem completely ordinary, who may be completely ordinary, outwardly like acquaintances who we imagine to be generally unnoteworthy and mundane, and the revelation of the decidedly unmundane in their lives, either experiences, or even in their reactions or analyses of relatively commonplace experiences. Also, the mocha crush is very good, and the large significantly larger than the medium, for only forty cents (plus tax) more. And I've heard the bar cookies are very good.

Found on the "take a book, leave a book" shelf at Bridgehead at Bank and Gilmour in Ottawa. Started reading it over a tea and had to bring it with me. :)

RELEASE NOTES:

Will leave the book on the table in the waiting room.