Here's a happy book, and a funny book too, with a happy ever after ending. The only wrinkle- is there anything to discuss at bookclub? Do angst filled novels lend themselves to discussion and dissection better than happy ones? Perhaps the book club conversation could broaden to what makes everyone happy, and then everyone could proceed directly to the wine and food!

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson bucks the rules of fiction, which usually requires that the protagonist discover his flaw and struggle to overcome it. It's a fun satire on the usual mystery, with plot coincidences that would make a soap opera writer proud!

The most dispassionate of protagonists, Allan is 100, and very tired of the nursing home matron who won't let him drink his vodka. He makes a run for it. Allan doesn't need to change one bit. It's the world and reader who need to change to understand Allan's trust that everything will turn out as it needs to turn out. Allan calmly proceeds through every event of note in the 20th century, unflappable and self sufficient.

So why does this work? Usually I would dislike a book that was empty of any personal growth in the protagonist. It would feel like the mechanical churning of plot. This book breaks the rules of luck and coincidence as well. And yet.

Perhaps it is this flaunting of all the rules that charms with a Rube Goldberg of a plot. Perhaps it is the reader who is changed, by thinking, "You know, perhaps Allan might teach me a thing or two about being open minded and adaptable."

Allan's flaws didn't shape a crisis and epiphany. The people in the world with all their theories and doctrines have the flaw, and if they chose to have an epiphany after reading this book, well that would be just fine with Alan. He would drink to that!

Perhaps you will too.

I first saw pop up patios in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. Part of the street in front of a business is reclaimed for pedestrians. This patio is on Kensington Road. The second popped up around the corner, and has attracted Doctor Who to stop by!

By Laurie Schut

Tactical urbanism is a buzz word these days. In case you haven't heard about it, it concerns strategies by citizens to reshape the urban fabric. Tactics from "open streets" to "pop-ups" are changing the way cities are formed. No longer just the realm of city planners, tactical urbanism is asking people to take charge of the way in which streets and neighborhoods develop. For example, "chair bombings" are simple interventions where people take apart pallets, reducing the waste that goes to landfills, and make chairs for everyone to use on sidewalks. This may seem like a small thing, but it starts to shape the way the street is used. Soon café tables appear, then people move the chairs into a sunnier position, and voila - the area is transformed. City planners can see the need for bylaws that reinforce these positive changes.

Tactical urbanism is not new. In the 1500's, travelling booksellers began setting up informal "pop-up" shops along the seine. In 1649 the booksellers were banned at Pont Neufe, and then later reinstated. In 1789 the word for these merchants, "bouquiniste" entered the French dictionary. In 1859 Paris granted permission to bouquinistes at fixed points along the Seine for a fee, and by the 1930's box dimensions were regulated. In 2007 the area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today there are 300,000 books, 900 boxes and 240 sellers along a three kilometer stretch of the Seine.

The reason we are writing about tactical urbanism today is that it something the Riley library is taking an interest in. Watch for future posts about our experiments.

And if this topic intrigues you, you might find the following library books well worth checking out. Click on the book cover to connect to our catalogue and find out more:

And here are a few links of interest:

The Atlantic Cities

Guide to Tactical Urbanism

Around the world, we’re now in India, a place I’ve actually physically visited, and am happy to revisit in my imagination. One of my favourite memories is going to a movie theatre, because in India going to the movies is a special event. The theatre was large and attractive, everyone dressed up, and the snack bar had a wide variety of sweet and savoury food. The audience was engrossed watching their favourite actors. We watched Dosti: Friends Forever with popular actor Akshay Kumar. The tour guide whispered to us what was happening in the plot, which was not entirely necessary because we loved the dancing and music. Some of us bought the soundtrack from a street vendor, and we played it on the tour bus. An Australian traveler Michael made fabulous dance moves up and down the bus aisle to the music. We would also watch out the windows for billboards featuring Akshay, especially the ads of him selling Thumbs Up, a cola pop. It was the theme song to our trip. When I’m feeling a little sad, I pop on the CD for a dance.

Many of the people on the tour had read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. It’s a Dickensian saga of four characters in the 1970s: a seamstress, 2 Dalit (Untouchable) tailors and a wealthy student. It's moving and sad. There are many fantastic Indian writers. Given that India is so stimulating to the senses, it’s the movies that especially trigger my memories. Here are some classics:

Gandhi- the classic with Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi

A Passage to India- from the E.M. Forster novel

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel- Maggie Smith again!

Monsoon Wedding- by the talented director Mira Nair

The Namesake- also by Mira Nair, based on a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri

Water- part of Deepa Mehta’s trilogy

The Life of Pi- 2013 Academy Award winner

No more time to reminisce, as we must press on. Like Nellie Bly, we will catch a steamer from Sri Lanka to Yokohama, Japan.

We’re now in Iran in our Around the World in 80 Days imaginary trip. Once I finished reading about Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s travels, I realized that we are 55 days into our trip, and we better get a move on. I proceeded straight to the Iranian restaurant Shiraz on Centre Street and ordered a takeout feast. In particular, I must recommend the delicious taste of the Persian stews. The chicken is cooked in a ground walnut and pomegranate paste, and well worth fighting with your family over the leftovers.

Once I worked as a cataloguer, bringing order to the library collections in order that everyone might discover useful information. I put Dewey Decimal numbers on books so they clustered together in thematic areas, and kept track of all the names of classical music pieces in different languages. When we were the first library to order a book, I added subject headings. Now when I start to explore a new country, the first thing I do is a search in the library catalogue to find reading possibilities using those subjects.

Search 1- Iran description and travel produces Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing. Alison pretends to be married to a friend so that she can travel in Iran in the late 1990's. Fifty pages started, and the observant narrator has drawn me in with her revealing anecdotes. Reading about the 3 day bus ride from Istanbul, I am immediately grateful that my trip only involves plunking down on the couch.

The library also owns Calgary writer’s Marcello di Cintio’s Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran, a travel description from a male perspective.

Search 2- Iran fiction produces Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novel about growing up in Iran during the revolution. It is moving, and thoughtful, and reminds me of the stories of a smart teenage girl trying to understand her situation from Lynda Barry. There is also a movie of this novel.

Search 3- Iran pictorial works. That’s a mouthful- “pictorial works”- but it produces the thick coffee table books full of photographs that I love. No little photos on Flickr for me- I want to heft up a big tome that presses into my lap. The one I picked was Inside Iran by Mark Edward Harris. I enjoyed the photographs of everyday life.

Search 4- Iran juvenile. This gives me the kids’ books about Iran, so I can take home something to share with my son. I is for Iran is by Shirin and Kamyar Adl. We learn interesting facts like that men are not supposed to wear gold jewelry, that you can ski in the mountains, and that the Grand Bazaar in Tehran is the biggest in the world.

Here are some other searches that may be useful to you in planning a trip:

[Country] + music = folk and contemporary pop music which we order from all around the world

[Country] + dvd = dvds are also purchased from many countries, and you can check in the catalogue which ones have English language tracks or subtitles. An even broader search is [Language] + dvd because many of the DVDs we purchase have multiple language tracks

[Country] + guidebooks= a list of all the guidebooks. For the armchair traveler, books published by Dorling Kindersley and National Geographic have colour photos included.

[Language] + language = language learning materials, often CDs with accompanying phrase books. Calgary Public Library also has a language learning database called Mango which you can find in the E-library.

Of course there are other ways to limit your search, such as the handy faceted searching boxes to click on the left. Type in a country that you’re interested in, just to see what surprises come up. Whether you’re travelling to the country in body or imagination, there’s lots to find. I’m going to rejoin Alison Wearing on the road to Tehran.

Join us for Thousand Dollar Thursday

The top four finalists for June make their 90-second pitches to the Awesome Team in quest of a $1000 grant to make their ideas a reality. Presented in partnership with the Awesome Foundation-Calgary.

You can check out the Awesome Foundation at http://www.awesomefoundation.org/

Did you know they helped fund the April's Wreck City event, in which Hillhurst houses slated for demolition were transformed by ACAD students into works of art? They also funded a diaper drive, skywriting, and a small delivery business idea.

Learn about micro-financing in action and see who wins this time! Thursday, June 27th from 6:00 -8 p.m. in our Program Building

I have come to think of my family’s imaginary trip around the world as “Slow Travel”, as we move quite leisurely between countries without the deadlines of meeting planes. If the books or food is particularly good, we just stay a little longer!

In 1889, journalist Nellie Bly traveled with much more urgency around the world in an attempt to match the pace set by the fictional Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. On November 4, 1889 she left New York taking only one suitcase and set out across the Atlantic on a steamer. One day later, a magazine sent Elizabeth Bisland to race her in the opposite direction. It was a precursor to the competitive stunting of reality TV. The World newspaper rallied interest in Nellie’s journey. They printed contest tickets for their readers to vote on Nellie Bly’s expected return time.

Nellie and Elizabeth’s stories are told in a new non fiction biography Eighty days : Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's history-making race around the world by Matthew Goodman. The women endured considerable discomfort on storm tossed seas and cold railway cars, stopping only for short sightseeing stops when they were waiting for a connection. Goodman cuts back and forth between their travels and research about the major topics of the time. Examinations of the role of women journalists, the British Empire, working conditions of the men fueling the coal burning steamer ships, and the importance of railroads are explored. It is a full and fascinating biography of both the women and their times. You can read it in a hard copy book, or download an Overdrive audio copy to listen to on your iPod.

To learn morea about Nellie Bly, I took out the children’s book Bylines: A Photobiography of Nellie Bly by Sue Macy. It is a quick overview of her life, although I looked in vain for a photo of the monkey McGinty she brought back from her travels.

The discomfort of their trip reminded me of the story of Colin Angus, who went around the world using only his own human energy by biking and rowing. I heard his story at the Calgary Zoo travel series. His book Beyond the Horizon is available as a DVD, ebook and regular book. Calgary Public Library has many other stories of adventurers circumnavigating the globe. You can find their stories using the subject Voyages around the world in the computer catalogue. There are the classics by Mark Twain, Joshua Slocum, Captain Cook and Charles Darwin. There are new adventures, including many about sea trips. And there is Babar's World Tour by Laurent de Brunhof. Don't forget the famous elephant family of your childhood!

Me, I’m going to stick to my “Slow travel” for now, so slow that I don’t actually go anywhere. I’ll let Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland experience the seasickness!

So here we are in Egypt. All I really want is a little heat and a deck chair on a boat sailing down the Nile. A boat like in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Specifically the 1978 film version with Bette Davis and Maggie Smith so I can snoop on their conversations along with Hercule Poirot. Watching Maggie Smith is one of the great pleasures in life, in Harry Potter, in Downtown Abbey, A Room with a View, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Gosford Park... Why the entertainment never ends! She is joined by Peter Ustinov as Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, and Mia Farrow, David Niven and Angela Lansbury also. I love Maggie’s mannish costumes, the plot machinations, the nostalgia of rewatching something from long ago, and the sightseeing at Abu Simbel, Karnak and the Pyramids.

And next to rewatch Cairo Time with another actress I never tire of: Patricia Clarkson. She of The Station Agent, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Pieces of April, and Lars and the Real Girl. This is a different kind of movie about Egypt entirely, a slow character driven art piece about a woman contemplating an affair with an Egyptian friend of her husband. It treats Egypt as a place where people live, instead of merely as a backdrop. As in Lulu in Marrakech, it considers the relationship between the expats and the natives.

As for books about Egypt, two come to mind. Our son loved the kids’ book Adventures in Ancient Egypt by Linda Bailey. This entertaining comic book series drawn by Bill Slavin has three kids jumping around in time thanks to the Good Times Travel Agency. After visiting Egypt, you may want to keep travelling to the Middle Ages, Ice Age, China, Ancient Greece and to meet the Vikings. There are reams of other interesting books for kids under Dewey Decimal number 932!

For adults who enjoy literary fiction, Anatomy of a Disappearance opens in Alexandria, Egypt. Author Hisham Matar gives us Nuri, a young boy mourning the death of his mother. He falls in love with a beautiful woman named Mona, whom his political dissident father weds. It is an uneasy trio of characters full of hidden motivations. When his father is kidnapped and disappears, Nuri struggles to understand. He slowly unravels the truth, and learns to live with the huge absence of his father.

Next stop on our Around the World in 80 Days Virtual Tour: Iran.

Greetings from Hungary

On Friday night in our Around the World in 80 Days trip we landed in Budapest. We learned that Buda and Pest were two cities that grew on opposite sides of the Danube River, and merged into the capital of Hungary. Our first thought – let’s eat! (Food does seem to play a rather large part in our interest to travel the world in our imaginations.) We crossed the Danube (as represented by its “stand in” the Bow River) and found Jonas Hungarian Restaurant at the south end of downtown Calgary.

I had signed out The Hungarian Cookbook by Susan Derecksey from the library, and so we knew the names of the main dishes, and how many of them include the spice paprika. We ordered the small plates of a whole bunch of dishes and dug in. There was Hungarian goulash (naturally), a delicious cabbage slaw, pork schnitzel, cabbage on noodles, chicken paprikash, beef stew with egg drop noodles, and deep fried cheese. The food is rich and tasty, and we decided the Hungarians gave the French a run for their money for creamy sauces. To finish off, there was a crepe with chocolate and ground walnut sauce and a delightful pear aperitif. By finish off, I mean a happy, waistband unbuttoning push away from the table for a restorative stroll along the Danube.

The Hungarian Cookbook was printed in 1972. We looked up the recipes when we got home, I mean back to our hotel. It was interesting to look at a 40 year old cookbook, with its small type, and lack of concern for design or photos. There was a card catalogue glued in the front, and a donation plate for the mother of someone I knew. It was like a little window back in time.

Rick Steves is an amiable traveler host, so we watched him stroll through Hungary in a travel DVD Eastern Europe 2000-2012. Many of the sites in Budapest were built during its 1000 year anniversary of the arrival of the Magyars in 1896. Then we finished our visit to Budapest by listening to some classical music. Hungarian composers are as plentiful as paprika. The library has lots of CDs by Bela Bartok, Franz Liszt, and Zoltan Kodaly.

Today we’re heading down the Danube south to the Mediterranean Sea and across to Egypt. It’s time to put a hold on the classic Agatha Christie DVD Death on the Nile.