Where to Find English Books in Drummondville, part 1
By Julie Miller
One of the best places for readers to find books in Drummondville is… the Village des Valeurs near the Super C! Who would have thought?
Tucked away on the last shelf after rows of kitchen accessories and just before you get to the linens, sheets, and bedspreads are two nondescript book shelf sections with a range of English second-hand books for all tastes. There are quite a few shelves of bestsellers, pulp fiction, murder mysteries and detective novels for those who want something to read while on holiday at the beach in the summer or at home on cold, stormy, winter days.
However, it doesn’t stop with fiction: there are travel books, children’s books, memoirs, and craft books: Make Your Own Birdhouse! Travel to Spain! And then there is always a fine selection of cookbooks. I recently found two collections of yummy dishes from the Urban Peasant for $4 each; including recipes for the tangiest lemon curd I’ve ever tasted and spicy meatballs with yoghurt sauce. I also snapped up a copy of Canadian Living’s Vegetarian Collection. It’s a book I’ve been wanting to buy, but instead of paying $23 plus shipping from Indigo, I paid $6.
Every time I pop in to check out Value Village’s books, I find a treasure. Once, I stumbled on an unlikely book: the autobiography of a legendary English soccer player (Wayne Rooney) which I grabbed for one of my soccer-loving sons (but I’ll read it too!) Then were was that little blue book that caught my eye: “Knit Your Own Dog,” with patterns to make the cutest little dogs you ever saw, from Chihuahuas to Springer Spaniels. What a find: I bought it, even though I don’t actually knit. I was buying 4 books anyway, and the fifth book is free, so why not? I’ll certainly find someone to gift it to one day (I still have it by the way, and if you’re a knitter and want it, just get in touch with me. I’ll trade it to you if you can knit me the little beagle on page 145.)
The real reason that I go back to check on their books though is that I’ve found some treasures on a pretty specialized area of interest of mine: women’s history. How strange, but true: I have found more than one book there over the years about feminism and women’s studies, jammed in between “Cakes and Cookies for Christmas” and “Travelling In Russia: 2002”. I couldn’t believe my eyes or my luck when I read the title on one book’s spine: “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This is a Pulitzer-Prize winning book that opens up details about women’s lives, which are so often absent from our usual historical narratives and the book now sits on my shelf at home. In another blog post, I’ll tell you about it, and the other feminist gems that have turned up so unexpectedly on the plain metal shelves of Village des Valeurs.
In the meantime, if you are a reader and you haven’t already discovered the Village des Valeurs English book shelves, you should drop and check it out for yourself sometime…
