Stayed up till 4 am reading Feet of Clay, marvellous book with an appalling number of typos and failures to close quotes. The American edition, I note. Went to bed resigned to losing the entire morning to sleep. Got up to pee four and a half hours later, as is my habit: and since it was broad daylight at that hour, stayed up. If I could do this regularly I'd be able to squeeze another three or four hours out of the day.

I must have my own copy of Guards! Guards! No bookstore has yielded it so far, so I bit the bullet and went over to Indigo, the Godless Bookstore Redivivus. Indigo was once the anti-Godless Bookstore when Chapters held that title. Indigo won the bookstore wars, but it was hardly a triumph for virtue. I hear nothing good about the woman who founded Indigo and a lot bad, like buying four or five old houses in TO's Old WASP Money neighbourhood and tearing several of them down to make herself and inside trader spouse a California-style monster house. Wretched excess goes down badly in this town, whatever the rest of Canada may think of us (note that the she-parvenu hails from Montreal and her spousal parvenu is from Winnipeg, proving what I've always said- the really obnoxious Torontonians come from somewhere else) so I have to hold my nose any time I go into Indigo.

It's also located inside a shopping centre, not on the street as Chapters was; both its branches have up escalators but leave you to limp the many many twisting stairs back down. Chapters had escalators in both directions. And its acrostic selection sucks, while Chapters had a broad range. So I miss Chapters.

I also miss Chapters because to get to Indigo I must go through Yorkville, once a pleasant enough old village, even after the money took it over. The money is now tearing Yorkville's old buildings down and putting up luxury condominium towers on narrow Yorkville Ave itself. How many luxury condos 'from 1.5 to 7 million' does any one town need? Yorkville will have three, and the current luxury hotel that took out a chunk of my 60s past. (To say nothing of the luxury condo that levelled the nearby stretch of Bloor St close to where I grew up and worked until 2002, and killed 40 years of associations thereby. The old Harvey's, the old Mr Sub, the old Chicken Chalet, all gone. Yes well- but so are the old buildings those were in, that were once other things: the Heinzmann piano store, the Murray's pharmacy with the soda fountain, the lingerie store that sold silk nightgowns and dressing gowns...) May the developers who put them up lose their collective shirts and be forced to declare personal and corporate bankruptcy: and may the rich idiots who buy their wretched product find themselves in their 50th floor penthouse suites buffeted by the hurricane force winds Toronto now suffers with global warming, that with any luck will have knocked out the wires that power the elevators.

And Indigo has all the Pratchett one could want, as godless bookstores are wont to do. It even has a couple of them in the large format discreet-covered English edition, at twice the price of the gaudy American version, so I sucked it up and bought my copy in that version. Almost like having a hardcover. Some writers can't sustain trade format, let alone hardcover- the spaciousness of the page reveals the bloat for what it is. Crowd it into a standard paperback size and maybe people won't notice; quite apart from the question of who wants 700 pages of Robin Hobb in hardcover for anything but a doorstop? But Pratchett rejoices in large pages and decent margins, and I shall be happy that I have one like that.

And probably go to amazon.ca for the rest, hereafter.