Bargain @ $1.99-$4.99 from various publishers couponable @ Kobo while your contest codes may or may not still be working (prices valid in Canada & US at least, probably though not necessarily price-matched at other retailers & regions):
Workman Publishing has nearly a dozen sale titles priced from $1.99-$2.99, mostly cookbooks by celebrity grilling chef Steve Raichlen, but they've also put film critic Danny Peary's (
Wikipedia) excellent set of "Cult Movies" collections of his retrospective cult classic film essays (
Wikipedia) on sale, which I highly recommend, and there's a freebie containing the Science Fiction ones
still available right here for you to try before you (maybe) buy. It'll be money well spent if you like insightful and entertaining film writing, IMHO.
Chronicle Books LLC has about a dozen titles on sale from $1.99-$2.99, mainly having to do with food or the outdoors. Most promising of the lot:
Homesteading/crafting specialty imprint
Storey Publishing has about 10 new sale books discounted to the the $2.99 mark, on crocheting, handling livestock for food purposes, making your own ice cream and wine and cheese, building your own cabin, etc. Most interesting of the lot:
Algonquin Books has about a half-dozen non-fiction titles in their $1.99 sale, including the autobiography of formerly closeted gay classic Hollywood film star Tab Hunter (
Wikipedia, now made into a documentary), a memoir of a woman who worked at
The New Yorker magazine from the 1950s onward and apparently has a lot of juicy behind-the-scenes stories about the luminaries there, some memoirs about people going on international travel trips to find themselves/their roots, including one about a guy descended from the long-isolated Kurdish Jews of Iraq who still speak Aramaic etc. Personal picks of the lot which I'll be getting if the samples read well enough:
- Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star by Tab Hunter; this is supposed to be pretty interesting, according to people who've seen the documentary, and I'm mildly interested in Old Hollywood too
- Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond, undertaking a road trip to various candy factories to learn about how the chocolate industry works while also exploring the social history of our cultural relationship to the sweet stuff. I'm a sucker for these types of books, and I highly recommend Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats by Steve Ettlinger (not on sale), which I read many years ago from the library and really liked (and turned out to be disturbingly informative about a food I've never eaten in my life and don't intend to)
- Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart by William Alexander. I'm also a sucker for people-trying-to-learn-languages and looking into the accompanying culture and methodology thereof. For another similar social history of the French language, I highly recommend The Story of French: From Charlemagne to Cirque du Soleil by Canadians Jean-Benoît Nadeau & Julie Barlow (not currently on sale, but couponable and sometimes Sourcebooks drops the price on their reprint of this), which I read many years ago and found excellent enough to pick up the authors' The Story of Spanish when it went on sale in recent months.
- Man With A Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook For Their Familes edited by John Donohue, an anthology of food-related essays and recipes and reminisces by various celebrities, including author Stephen King and journalist Mark Kurlansky (whose book on the codfish I read and enjoyed in the past), and celebrity chefs Mark Bittman & Mario Batali et al.
Island Press, who've generously given us a number of quality science/nature/environmentalism freebies in the past including the current book on shrimp upthread, have a selection of their titles discounted to $4.99 (regularly much more expensive), apparently to tie-in to Kobo's current US & Canada holiday sales.
A number of other publishers include "Island Press" as part of their imprint names, so there's a bunch of their stuff (including some erotic romance titles with suggestive covers on the early pages, you have been warned) mixed in, but
start near the bottom of page 4 here and keep going until page 7 and that should be all their sale titles, some of which you can also see via the
Island Press E-ssentials series autosearch. NB: a few of these have been free in the past, so please check your accounts if they look interesting to you. My personal pick of the lot:
- Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge by fellow Canadian Edward Struzik, a former Harvard & MIT researcher who was awarded a prestigious journalism prize, according to his Yale Environment 360 blurb, where you can also read some of his columns written for the university's online magazine. I just have this interest in stuff that involves very northern regions (including the Canadian arctic), and the author also goes and talks with our indigenous peoples as well as the usual "experts", so bonus points.
Finally, there's a good lot of quality non-fiction titles (lots of cultural history & politics & science & cookbooks) included in the Kobo Canada Day & US Independence Day sales good through 11:59 PM Eastern Time on July 6th, many of which are not couponable, but on significant discount from their major publishers.
Linkage to the dedicated sale pages:
Canada &
US (some titles available discounted in both regions and possibly elsewhere, may or may not be price-matched at other retailers). Picks of the lot:
@ $2.99:
- Never Cry Wolf (not couponable) by the late Farley Mowat (Wikipedia), one of the great Canadian classics (Wikipedia) and a fictionalized narrative version of his real-life experiences investigating the decline of Arctic caribou and thereby running into wolves and their conservation issues circa the mid-60s. There's also a Disney-produced film (Wikipedia) which you may or may not have seen. For some reason (probably the Disney tie-in), they filed this under the Kids/YA specials section.
@ $4.99:
- Monkeys, Myths and Molecules: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Science of Everyday Life by Dr. Joe Schwarcz (Wikipedia), a chemist & professor at McGill University in Montréal who specializes in explaining various points of science in a layperson-accessible manner. This is probably another collection of his newspaper columns, which are excellent and recommended. I've read some of his previous books and they were both entertaining and informative, so I'm snapping this one up (these tend to go on sale one at a time during Kobo holiday specials).
- An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth (not couponable) by retired former commander of the International Space Station Chris Hadfield (Wikipedia), a memoir of his terrestrial training and time on the station and various other insights into Life, the Universe, and Everything
- Salmon: A Scientific Memoir by Jude Isabella, a science writer for Canadian Geographic magazine. This looks like a promising nature/science/society interaction sort of thing about Exactly What It Says In The Title from a small press that specializes in wildlife/nature exploration/ecology stuff, and I'm a sucker for that sort of thing