About Nico


I'm a senior business analyst, writer, blogger and tarot consultant based in Toronto, Canada.


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5 Book Blogs You Should Be Reading

By Nico on Tuesday the 9th of March, 2010 at 4:14 pm

RSS IconThere are hundreds of literary blogs out there and I subscribe to several dozen of them, but recently I’ve pared down my RSS subscriptions again, and thought I’d share five of my favourites.

So I present to you, in no particular order:

1. Bookninja

George Murray posts several times a day, commenting on the latest in book news, reviews and miscellanea with snappy asides and acidic author bias. It’s lovely.

A few recent posts: “The literary Devil don’t want Toronto’s soul“, “Amazon and Apple bringing ebooks bar fight to Canada?“, “Sargent rallies the troops“.

Bonus: Free snark! (Read more…)

A Nico-eyed view

By Nico on Thursday the 4th of March, 2010 at 7:31 pm

In 2009 my husband took a series of pictures he described as my view of the world. I thought it might be fun to reproduce them here.

Nico's World

I imagine you can guess the theme. (Read more…)

Book Club: Wuthering Heights

By Nico on Saturday the 5th of September, 2009 at 10:59 am

My friend Jo and I both love to read. So do many of my other friends. We talk about books all the time, and thought it might be fun to (semi-)formalize this into a book club. Jo and I both feel left behind in the classics – there’s just too many of them, and only so much time to read, and we haven’t read all the same things. So, we decided on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for our first book club pick.

The meeting was held in August, and as September’s meeting will be tomorrow, I’m rushing to capture my notes on the book here before they’re lost.

Neither of us had read Wuthering Heights before nor seen any of the various film adaptations,(1) and we were looking forward to it. I found myself disappointed. (Read more…)

Footnotes:


  1. Though I had the misfortune of being sent a link to the Kate Bush video shortly after our book club pick was announced. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Kara. [↩]

An Evening with Toronto’s Boyfriend, Neil Gaiman

By Nico on Saturday the 18th of July, 2009 at 5:00 pm

An Evening with Neil Gaiman, at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts

An Evening with Neil Gaiman

I’d originally meant to post this write-up after the event itself, but got rather busy, so here’s the truncated version.

Luminato is a new arts festival in Toronto; this is its second year. Neil Gaiman headlined the literary program with an interview, reading, Q&A and, of course, a lengthy signing.

Tickets were cheap (only $15) and when they were made available to the public they sold out in three minutes. Three. Minutes.

Fortunately, my husband received advanced notification from theglobeandmail.com and were able to purchase ours early. They may have killed their books section, very nearly causing me to cancel my subscription in protest, but I suppose there are still some benefits.

Anyway. Gaiman. (Read more…)

Seven reasons booksellers hate their customers

By Nico on Thursday the 25th of June, 2009 at 7:44 pm

Matt Blind has written a disturbingly accurate light and humourous piece on the different types of customers who visit bookstores.

Grazers

Grazers don’t need a book, or want a book, but they love coming in to the bookstore, and love lingering leisurely over all the tables, racks, endcaps, promotional displays, and front-of-store placements. If they can do this while a bookseller is attempting to replenish or reset the display, all the better.

The only redeeming feature of a grazer is that they can only accomplish their task with a cup of coffee in their hand — pardon, with a $4 half-soy-half-decaf-latte-with-a-shot-of-pretention — and while they clog the main aisle and generally pose a hazard to navigation, they are mostly harmless. They might try to casually engage you conversation, “How’s Business?”, but they don’t really care. Their primary goal is being in a bookstore for an hour each week so they can insert an off-hand, “oh I saw that the other day at Big Box Books” in later conversations, proving to their friends that they are topical and literate.

Bonus: They buy coffee. Margins on coffee are excellent.

From “Rethinking the Box: The Seven Types of Customer“

My store didn’t sell coffee (apparently we were missing out on a huge opportunity here)  but it certainly reads familiar. (Read more…)

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