As our long-time customers will remember, my dad always used to write the anchor essay for this newsletter. It’s been a few of years since he was able to do that with any regularity and it makes me sad that our new customers won’t have had the benefit of the breadth of his opinion and analysis. He had strong opinions, occasionally that strong opinion was to have no opinion, but love him or leave him, he could always find you a book you would love. I really felt like a grown-up for the first time when I came home from university at Thanksgiving of my first year and he produced a book within minutes of my arrival, something he had done with my siblings for years.
We just passed the first anniversary of his death and I wanted to try to find a way to memorialize him to all of you without getting maudlin or just listing his amazing achievements. He was of course a brilliant academic, an upstanding member of the communities he chose to participate in, and a generous friend and neighbour. He was also an amazing dad who alongside my Mom promoted a love of reading my whole life.
(To be clear, I have many special memories of books shared with my Mom too, but fortunately we continue to be able to build those memories. She’ll forgive me for not writing about them here.)
My first memory with regards to books was when I was in Kindergarten and we had a year long project to track the books we read with comments. As a parent, I now recognize this is more homework for the parent than the child, and the effort Mum and Dad put in is apparent. I still have the log. But the first book I actually remember sharing with him is The Saturdays by Elizbeth Enright, the first in her ‘Melendy’ series. It’s about a family of four kids with a single Dad, housekeeper, and a sprawling brownstone in New York City. I remember Dad reading it to me. I don’t remember if we read all four books. But I remember loving it, not least because he read it to me. In order to relive not just the book but sort of the experience, I downloaded the audiobook from Libro.fm. And it was charming. I don’t want to suggest that 21st century kids would find it slow, but maybe they would? But absolutely recommended as a re-read for anyone who remembers it from their childhood, and given it was published in 1941, that will erect a big tent of possible readers.
Dad, as you know, liked all kinds of books. He obviously loved mysteries and thrillers and was an early booster of the dark Scandinavian authors, particularly Stieg Larsson. He liked complicated literary stories as much as he liked Michael Connelly. He liked historical thrillers like those by Philip Kerr and never wanted to know he was reading an author’s last book. He also loved Science Fiction and Fantasy. The eclectic nature of what you find in the store, particularly on the used shelves, is a representation of his reading tastes that he shared with all of us. If you made a Venn diagram of Bumsted reading tastes, there would be lots of overlap, but in the centre would sit Terry Pratchett.
Truckers was Terry Pratchett’s first children’s book, the first in his Bromeliad series. I’ll be honest, I don’t recall liking it that much and I don’t know that we finished it. Terry Pratchett finally clicked for me in the summer of 1995, just before I turned 13, when we spent the summer in Berlin. Michael had spent the spring there with Dad and had gone properly down the Pratchett rabbit hole and I joined in when we arrived in late June. I’m not sure if I started with The Colour of Magic. Certainly my most vivid memory involves reading Wyrd Sisters in an opera house. The stories with the Witches were always my favorite. If I had to pick a favorite Pratchett though, it is hands down Monstrous Regiment. I can’t tell you much about it without giving it away, but I will say that every time I reread it, it surprises and delights me. It is set in the Discworld but requires no previous Discworld knowledge, bar the acceptance that the Discworld is a weird place. An excellent way in for a teenage girl.
One of my unpopular opinions is that I don’t much care for traditional Can Lit. So serious. So tedious. But the advantage of being the child of a Canadian Studies scholar is that your basement is filled with it and you can keep trying until you find something you like. And so, I always loved Timothy Findley. Famous Last Words is a masterpiece and if you have any interest in WWII, you should read it.
I think that The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis were the first books pressed upon me when I arrived home from university. I say this because although they were published in the 90s, I recall reading them on a plane. I recall them being around the house and not being interested until Dad insisted I read them. It is hard to think of a more prescient title for these pandemic times that The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, that followed. Willis is one of those enraging writers that publishes sporadically and then never quite what you expect. Dad loved Science Fiction in a way I never could, but her Bellwether was a good crossover moment.
I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but if I talk about every book we both loved this newsletter would be only this essay. What I would love is if you would reach out and tell us what books he brought into your life, especially if it was something you didn’t think you would like and just had to trust him. Find me at mysterysian@gmail.com or email the store at mystery@whodunitbooks.ca.