Come on in

Welcome to the Love Books blog, and I dare you to say that five times fast.

I can’t do it, even though I wrote it. But then I also wrote/am writing a series of short stories about a gang of senior-citizen vigilantes. I had to go and call the gang “The Grey Brigade”. I can’t say that even once without tripping over my tongue and spluttering, even though I wrote it. 

Oh, well, that’s just like me. 

Another thing about the title of this blog is just like me. It can be read as meaning three different things. It’s a triple-play pun. My dad would be so proud of me.

First, there’s (I/we) love books. What I love best about that part of the pun is that, as the title for a blog, it lets me get away with writing about any book that takes the fancy. I like avoiding rules.

Love Books could also be an order: love books or else I’ll summon the Word Witch and her machine gun with a decree: never read a book again. (Ohmigawsh, could there be a worse punishment? Uh, maybe there could be. She could make sure you’re not alive to ever read a book again.)

Finally, you could read Love Books as a shelf label for romance novels dreamed up by a mad librarian who hates the formality of the Dewey Decimal System. 

This won’t be the last pun you read in the Love Books blog. I guarantee that. 

I come by my love of word play honestly. On a scale of 1 to 10, my dad was a level 15 punster.

Let me prove it to you.

Dad put an aquarium in the basement of our house when I was a kid. That finished basement was called the rec room. That’s short for recreation room, by the way, and that probably gives you a good hint about just how many years I’ve been devouring books. And that’s all we’ll say about that, thank you very much.

Dad’s humongous sense of humor and the absurd extended beyond puns. He couldn’t put his aquarium on a sedate stand in the corner like a normal person. No, he had to set it into the wall and put a frame around it. It looked like a living painting with his Guppies and Black Mollies and Angelfish frolicking around in there. 

We’re Canadian, so we’re more used to French than many North Americans are. This means we’re quite likely to say something like pièce de résistance in normal conversation. We even know it means the crowning glory of a chef’s meal, or the best and most marvelous of some other group or series. And we even make our feeble anglais attempts at pronouncing the phrase en français. 

Most of us, though, aren’t nearly as good at French as we think we are. Dad was no exception.

He thought his living painting was the cat’s meow. He also thought his aquarium had to have a little brass plate with the title of this artistic creation, just like a real painting. 

Being anglais, he also thought he knew that French for fish is pêche.

All this plus his passion for puns made the name he put on that little brass plate inevitable.

Pêches de résistance. 

Thank goodness I was well into adulthood and beyond bursting into tears of disappointment by the time I found out that the title should have read: Poissons de résistance. That’s no pun! Doesn’t have the same ring to it either.

Okay, so my eyes leaked a little, and they do to this day. 

I’m thrilled to see bookstores, online or in real life, awash in a tidal wave of cozy mysteries that use puns. They make me think, never mind reading the books; I’ll just read the titles.

No, not really. 

Even New York Times bestsellers don’t consider puns below them. Mega-seller M.C. Beaton dared to write Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death among many, many others. It’s on my To Be Read list along with about 6,000 other books and climbing on my Ereader.

That brings us to another thing we won’t dwell on: the thousand books or so kicking around the house, no matter how hard I try to replace them with Ebooks. I’m grateful that I declared a moratorium on reading long enough to make a four-tier, six-foot series of bookshelves that house paperbacks perfectly in what used to be a closet in the Junk Room.

Of course mega-thousands of books have made it past my To Be Read list and on to my Loved It list. Nancy Warren’s stuff is way up near the top of that list. She got two brilliant puns into her cozy paranormal boxed set called The Great Witches Baking Show. 

Nancy, in her blurb for The Great Witches Baking Show, calls it “a loving homage to all competition baking shows, but especially Bake-Off. Imagine Bake-Off with witches and murders — and recipes! Set in the lovely English countryside, these are classic British mysteries with a twist. There’s no gore, swearing or sex in these paranormal cozy mysteries, just good fun, quirky characters, an interfering ghost and an adorable familiar or three.” 

All of which is a pretty good description of the genre, or sub-genre if you prefer to chop it up that way. (Just make sure  your chopping is in a gore-free zone so the genre gendarmes don’t come get you.)

I picked up my copy of the boxed set, by the way, as an audiobook at https://www.chirpbooks.com for $2.25 (note for my fellow Canadians: that’s in American money), even with the tax. If there’s anything I love more than books, it’s getting a book bargain, and Chirp has lots of them.

Chirp’s revolving supersales on audiobooks are brought to you by https://www.bookbub.com, the same people who bring you some of the best-known ebook freebies and sales around. 

I bet my dad could have named my Love Books blog with a title that could be read in five different ways, never mind my lousy little three. As long as he didn’t try to do it in French.

Are your punning skills up to a challenge? I’ll even settle for a title that can be read in a mere four different ways. I’m all ears, for a while at least. Sooner or later, I’ll want to relax and settle in on one title for this cornucopia of columns.

Oops. “Columns”. That slipped out, partly because I can’t resist alliterating all over the page any more than I can resist punning. But also, “post” isn’t how I think of this arena to blather on about books in any way that takes my fancy. I had too many years of writing what newspapers prefer to call columns. 

When you spend three decades laboring in the trenches of a major big-city newspaper, you can end up writing a fair number of columns, even if you’re mostly an editor. I wrote four columns at various times.

My favorite was Under the Covers, a book-review column about romance novels. That one appeared in the Saturday edition, which had a readership of 2.5 million people, although I don’t think quite that many read love books.

The other columns were Penny Pincher’s Guide, Computerwatch, and Star Probe. 

That last one really made my chest puff out with pride. It was a type of column you may know by the term “action line”. People got in touch with us when they thought they’d been ripped off, and we fixed it for them in a startling number of cases. 

It was great fun to take on the provincial government when one of its departments started acting like the worst of mail-order outfits. People were ordering birth and marriage certificates and the like, sending in their money, and getting nothing for months on end. 

The department had just moved to a new city. The transfer must have been managed by the movers from hell. The bureaucrats couldn’t find anything.

The head honcho finally set up a special team to handle complaints forwarded by Star Probe. Great! At least some people got what they paid for. Everyone else could have too for the price of a stamp to send us a letter. 

The newspaper ended the column in the recession of the 1990s. A decade later, people were still calling the switchboard for help at the rate of dozens a week. They kept saying things like: “The police said it was fraud, but they don’t have the manpower to do anything about it. They said to call Star Probe.” 

Sigh.

The Love Books blog won’t have that kind of impact, of course, but I do plan to have fun in a column by a book lover for book lovers. I’m wa-a-ay open to your ideas and topics too. There’s a “Comments” space for them below, or use the form to drop me an email. 

Mention your name, and I’ll put it on a list of potential names for characters in my books. After all, I’ve run out of nieces, nephews, and grand-nieces and -nephews to name my characters after.