Starting Stories
As I mentioned, April 28, 2018 was Amandi's first EPL Book Sale, and she enjoyed the event as much as I do. Twice a year, the Edmonton Public Library sells off surplus and low-circulation items at bargain prices: hardcover books and DVDs $2, paperbacks $1, special items as marked. And apart from the prices, because the source is a library, not a store, the items available have been through a profoundly different curation process than the discount shelves at Chapters. Would Murder Under Trust: the Topical Macbeth and Other Jacobean Matters ever be offered at a big box retailer? Deborah Howard's The Architectural History of Venice? And the real prize: The Blade Runner Experience!
We were especially amused to see copies of two Bernard Cornwell's novels, Copperhead and Battle Flag, amongst the books laid out on tables in the atrium of Enterprise Square; amused because at a 2012 EPL Book Sale, I'd purchased the first three of the four books in Cornwell's Nathaniel Starbuck's Chronicles, carried them through two moves, and ultimately lost Books II and III, without reading any of them.
Amandi can be a voracious reader. If we lack high quality serial television, she can fill her spare time happily speeding through novels so long as they are not post-modern works where the narrator repeatedly intrudes into the story with second person addresses complementing the reader on their taste in books. She was in a bit of a crisis this winter when we finished watching Stranger Things and Erased on Netflix, worked through all five seasons of Battlestar Galactica on Google Play, and she had caught up on the works of her favourite authors, especially Haruki Murakami.
"Are there any good novels about the Civil War?" she asked. It was quite an inquiry. Perhaps understandably, the American Civil war used to be an uncommon topic in Canada. But this changed significantly in 2016 when Dylann Roof murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina church after posting pictures of himself with the Confederate Battle Flag and spawning the era of monument take-downs.
Back in the day, people in our social circle did not even know a War Between the States had been fought. Civil wars happened in Africa, not North America. And even Amandi would recommend civil war dramas to me only to discover that they were actually period dramas about the Revolutionary War. So, for her to ask after a Civil War novel was quite a thing.
I have a vague memory of packing a box and regarding the three Cornwell books: Rebel, Copperhead, and Battle Flag, and thinking that I'll keep the first one handy, and retrieve the others later. I toured the bookshelves at Hecla 305 and gave Rebel to Amandi who finished it at her usual speed and learning more about the First Battle of Bull Run than I ever knew.
Once Rebel was finished, our discretionary time included shopping used bookstores in search of what we thought at the time, was the remaining 2/3rds of a trilogy. We found Book III at a Alhambra Books in one of Edmonton's Off-Whyte shopping areas and set it aside until Book II was found. Copperhead proved to be a challenge. Bernard Cornwell is a prolific writer, but as everyone else but us knows, the American Civil War is not his most famous period series.
We even shopped for Copperhead while walking through the Kanda Second-hand Books Area in Tokyo north of the Japanese Imperial Palace Gardens at the beginning of April. It was a faint-hope ambition, to be sure, with the tiny minority of books there in English, but we wanted to visit Kanda to see what kind of district can get the words "second-hand books" published on a map.
Eventually the EPL copy of Copperhead became available and Amandi devoured the story at Ball's Bluff, and Battle Flag's story at Second Manassas. It turns out, there is a fourth book and we're now hunting for The Bloody Ground.
"It actually explains a lot," Amandi said, alluding how greater familiarity with Civil War history informs her sense of contemporary American political culture. "They really hated each other, and that kind of thing does not go away quickly." The Civil War was not so long ago. I have seen video reports that Union and Confederate veterans marched in Veterans Day Parades as late as 1955 which means there are people my parents age with living memory of Civil War veterans.
No, it's not very long at all.
Amandi's first direct contact with Civil War culture, apart from my re-telling my childhood travel stories and movies like Cold Mountain, Gettysburg, and Ride With the Devil, was on our trip to New Orleans in January 2017.
