In library and information science, bibliotherapy is the matching of reader and text to provide comfort, insight, or catharsis. It is about reading as a means to healing of the soul and the psyche. In the past month I have been especially in need of the comfort and insight provided by reading and perhaps especially of reading as a better or at least different reality than the real world.

On October 1st I embarked on a three-day trip to Saskatoon with a friend, a last quick visit before winter. In the four years I lived in this small city, I was frequently dissatisfied and longed to be back in Edmonton. Now that I have been back in my home town for five years, I enjoy the best that Saskatoon has to offer.

When I worked in libraries I bought few books. At 69 I shop for books with the same zeal I used to devote to shoes and clothes. I figure I now have enough of both of those things to last for the rest of my life, and I now feel the same urgency about finding just the right book and never being without a book I absolutely must read right now as I used to feel about dressing up.

As a person who loves books, I go to Saskatoon to enjoy its two wonderful bookstores. McNally Robinson is better than any bookstore in Edmonton. Like all large bookstores it now sells jewellery and purses and expensive clothes of the type indulgent grandmothers less thrifty and practical than myself buy for their adored grandchildren. And it has a mid-priced and usually very good restaurant where I feel comfortable lingering for hours of conversation with Saskatoon friends.

Along with these add-ons, McNally Robinson still has books as its main focus. While you will be lucky to find even one book by a writers such as Edna O’Brien and Jane Gardam in an Edmonton bookstore, possibly multiple copies of the same current title if you find anything, at McNally Robinson I have been thrilled to find seven or eight different titles by such midlist authors.

Saskatoon also has an outstanding second-hand book store in Westgate Books, the best second-hand bookstore I have been in other than the Strand in New York City. Not only does Westgate Books have an extensive and well-organized stock out front, the owner also has detailed knowledge of what is in the back.

Out front the books are organized not just by broad categories such as history. The history of Asia is broken down by country, and there is a separate section on the Holocaust. There are fiction sections of British women and British male writers and American male and female writers, and extensive and precisely organized Canadiana. I bought two of my most treasured books, Siege by Anna Reid, and Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale, on earlier visits to Westgate Books.

The day before my friend and I left Edmonton, a policeman was attacked with a knife near Commonwealth Stadium by a man who then led other police on a high-speed chase in a rented U-Haul van. Four people were hurt by the van driver in this chase but no one was killed, and the policeman who was attacked initially did not even draw his gun. It is a reflection of how we have become accustomed to such events that I was not particularly upset by this. Bad things happen everywhere, and as bad things go, this was hardly one of the worst. It was upsetting to me that the chase ended near Audreys Books, a place I visit almost every time I am downtown.

I was more upset by the stabbing deaths around the same time of two women at the train station in Marseille, a city where I spent three days earlier this year with my husband, and a place where I felt safe, in spite of the continuing security alert in all of France. It’s a place I loved and plan to go back to. Residents seemed to be going about their lives without fear, and not to be so sick of tourists as people who live in supposedly more appealing destinations.

On our way into Saskatoon that Sunday my friend and I stopped at the Value Village on Circle Drive. I haven’t previously mentioned Saskatoon thrift stores as good places to shop for books, but in fact they are, just like the ones in Edmonton. That Sunday I bought two hardcover books in perfect condition: The Wonder by Emma Donoghue and Shanghai Girls by Lisa See. The former is a book I’ve been wanting to read, the latter is a replacement for the paperback copy of a book I’ve read and loved. The covers of her novels give the impression that Lisa See’s books are chick lit, but they are much more than that.

Tired from the accumulated stress of arranging our lives at home so we could get away for a few days and the drive in not very pleasant weather, my friend and I had supper with a Saskatoon friend, and retired early. We awoke the next morning to have breakfast and then to head straight to Mayfair Hardware. My friend’s parents lived a few blocks from Mayfair Hardware, where her dad dropped in for coffee every day. The elderly owner no longer remembers the dad or the daughter, but we drop in anyway every time we’re in the city

The owner’s son informed us of the mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others. I have been to Las Vegas and although we didn’t gamble, I don’t regret going there, because I got a sense of what other people are talking about.

Even Las Vegas has a strong book connection for me. My best memory of our 2011 trip is of a self-guided tour of its second-hand bookstores. My husband used Google to make a hand-drawn map, which enabled us to walk to the farthest store, taking a taxi back to the hotel. This walking tour showed us that there is life in Las Vegas outside of the glitz and glamour and gambling, that some people still care about Southwest history, local flora and fauna, and the wider world.

While taking in the news of the terrrible shootings in Las Vegas, I consoled myself with the purchase of a beautiful small stainless steel ladle at Mayfair Hardware. As a person who loves making and eating soup, I have a number of ladles in a number of different sizes.

After having coffee with one Saskatoon friend and lunch with another, I spent most of Monday afternoon at McNally Robinson. I usually find some real treasures in the sale books section, but did not find anything new since my last visit on July 21^st. I paid full price for Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese and Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. I have been wanting to read these two books for a while and figure that if I don’t sometimes pay full price, there will soon be no bookstores left. The fact that there will be no more books from Wagamese made me feel a sense of urgency in buying this one.

The morning we left Saskatoon for home, we stopped in at Westgate Books again. Although I had not seen any irresistible books I did not already have on my brief visit the previous day, I had spotted a pamphlet called 100 Embroidery Stitches by the till as I was leaving. It did not call to me that loudly at the time but after sleeping on the matter, I felt I had to have this little book. The original cover price of 35 cents had inflated to three whole dollars. We were anxious to get home by supper time, so I had to decline the owner’s offer that I look through three boxes of craft and sewing books that had just come in.

My mother was an expert embroiderer. The undersides of her work were almost as perfect as the top sides and had no dangling threads. She has been dead long enough that I feel ready to tackle some embroidery myself, while accepting that mine will be simple and basic and unskilled compared with her work

I have a beautiful pale orange paisley shawl I bought at the Khan Market in Delhi in 2010. In a rare game of tug-of-war, my dog Lucy and my friend’s dog Chloe made big holes in this shawl. When the vest I was wearing the day I met my husband grew threadbare around the edges, I cut out some good pieces and used them to patch the holes in the shawl. With the book of embroidery stitches I hope I will be able to make the patches look more finished and less tacked on, a little more like my mother’s perfect mending.

And back in Edmonton at the Chapters on Whyte Avenue three days later, on our way to the Varscona Theatre, I paid full price for Red Famine by Anne Applebaum and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I already own two books by Anne Applebaum. I read this one virtually in one sitting the day after I bought it, and will eventually be reviewing it. Ishiguro was in my thoughts because he had just won the Nobel Prize and because Elaine Lui, whom I admire for her intelligent sassiness and her promotion of books and reading, had written a blog post about this author and this book in particular:

 Once in a while, a book comes along that actually changes your eyesight. I know this seems hyperbolic and I might sound hysterical, but every time I read Never Let Me Go, the colours outside look brighter, and deeper, because Ishiguro does what all the great artists do – his writing  amplifies your feelings, his work creates a safe space for sensitivity and vulnerability in service of the ultimate goal which is, always, empathy.

If there was one quality the Las Vegas shooter was lacking, it was empathy. I wish he had read more and gambled less. Of course it is not true that all readers are made more empathetic and thus better by reading. Stalin was a great reader, reading and annotating up to 500 pages a day at the height of the Terror. For a psychopath such as Stalin may have been, reading may lead not to greater empathy but to a kind of understanding of one’s fellow humans that makes it easier to manipulate them. Few people are psychopaths, and there is always at least the possibility that reading will make people better, and I believe that in most cases it does.

In the reading and the buying of books I find a world that I have control of and a world that makes sense—both while I am taken down new paths—in a way the actual world does not. The world of books is eternal and yet always expanding.

Since the terrible shooting in Las Vegas, the news cycle had moved on. The Rhohingya refugee crisis has escalated. The nuclear stand-off between the US and North Korea continues, with the nuclear clock is at its most dire point since 1953. The finance minister remains been utterly blind to the implications of his failure to put his vast wealth in a blind trust.

We have now moved on to Act 7 of “Shooting Aftermath: A Pantomime in 7 Acts,” a wonderful piece of writing by Richard Warnica in the October 7^th National Post. This explains how so little changes after such a tragedy, why even the massacre of children at Sandy Hook was not enough to change US gun laws. As Warnica says in Act 4, “Now Is Not the Time,” “If there’s one thing the American right agrees on universally, even now, in this age of populist revolt, it’s that the immediate aftermath of a mass killing enabled by lax gun laws is absolutely not the right time to be talking about lax gun laws.”

More than one commentator remarked that President Trump, so keen on keeping out Muslims who might commit a terrorist act, drew few conclusions from this case of a rich white man, American all his life, who actually did commit a terrorist act.

Now, more than ever, we need books.