Update on The Top 100 Canadian Singles Book

Just found out that there is a Temiskaming Connection with "The top 100 Canadian Singles" book.

"With Burton Cummings in the fold, they had the collective talent to be more than a one-hit wonder"
--Lee Marshall, broadcaster"

And if you check out page 199 you will see Lee Marshall, broadcaster, Temiskaming Shores, ON

Huh, pretty cool!


A book that gets to the heart of the matter! Whether you're a professional musician or an air guitarist, a collector or a true amateur, this book will shake things up! Coming this fall: The Top 100 Canadian Singles -- brought to you by Bob Mersereau and Goose Lane Editions, the team that assembled the controversial, much discussed, best-selling volume, The Top 100 Canadian Albums. The Top 100 Canadian Singles will undoubtedly stir the souls, ears, and tongues of music lovers everywhere. And answer the question, for better or for worse. Once again, Bob Mersereau has assembled a blue ribbon panel of musicians, broadcasters, reviewers, managers, promoters, record-label executives, retailers, roadies, and more to cast their votes in a major, nationwide poll. John Roberts, Canada's original VJ; Joel Plaskett; Sarah Slean; the late Paul Quarrington; CBC's Stuart McLean; Sam Roberts; Sophie Durocher; and Eric Trudel all contributed lists -- along with hundreds more. Whose single will make it to the top 10? The top 40? The top 100? Neil or Leonard? Feist or Alanis? k.d. lang or Stompin' Tom? The Guess Who or Arcade Fire? Gilles Vigneault or k-os? Once again, the countdown is on! We'll all be waiting for the answer in early October. This oversized, full colour book features in-depth interviews with musicians, fascinating facts, musician-penned sidebars, documentary photographs, cover art, and much, much more. And yes, Bob will be on the road again -- appearing at a venue near you.

Supplement to: Discovering Wild Temiskaming

Local Author Murry Muir has just releases a Supplement to his wildly popular local book "Discovering Wild Temiskaming".

The Supplement features the Ottawa-Temiskaming Highland Trail.

Icluded in the Supplement are the following:

Ottertail Creek to Grand Campment Bay
The Inland High Trail
Gorrie Lake to Friday Lake
Red Pine Pond to Hohnson Lake
Rib Mountain Side Trails

Also included are "Favourite Bushwhacking Snowshoe Trips"

To Island Lake
Windy Lake Explorations
Hills and Valleys South of Rib Lake
The Quebec Half of Wild Temiskaming
Lowdown Creek Detour
Hearst Falls Area Detour
Twin Lakes Trails Reroute

Since the Second printing of our book "Discovering Wild Temiskaming" there have been many improvements to the Ottawa-Temiskaming Highland Trail. The Trail has been extended another sixteen kilometers south. There is a proposal before the MNR and Parks Ontario for clearing the trail a further twenty five kilometers south...

If you would like to order a copy of ""Supplement to: Discovering Wild Temiskaming" you can call the store at 705-647-8215 or send us an email at chatnoir@ntl.sympatico.ca.

YAY!! The Douglas & McIntyre edition of The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud is in stock! We have loads so come on in!

If you are like me and will still want the beautiful copy from Gaspereau Press even after I've got this one, please let us know and we'll put your name on the wait list for one. We really are not sure when they'll be in but somethings are worth waiting for, quality and beauty count for me so I'm looking forward to getting mine. :)

Douglas & McIntyre edition of The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

New Plushies!

Wish Lists

Have you used the Wish List feature on our shopping site? If not this is the time to give it a shot! Create an account for online shopping on our site and then start adding stuff to your wishlist - you just click on the Add to Wishlist Button.



Add things till your heart's content. You can access your wishlist through the My Lists button:




Then either print it or email it to your loved ones to let them know exactly what you'd like from Chat Noir Books.



You can also email your wishlist to us here at the store if you'd like and we will keep a copy so that all you have to do is sent your loved ones in to see us and we'll know exactly what to point them toward. You'll notice our email is conveniently located at the bottom of the screen.




Go ahead - Try it! Shop/Make Wishlist now.

Holiday Hours Starting Dec 17

New Frosty Nights Coffee Flavour!!

Check out the new Christmas Flavoured coffee from the The Las Chicas Del Cafe: Frosty Nights.

Toffee based flavour with hints of hazelnut and cinnamon. MMMmmmmm!

Available at Chat Noir Books!

Canada Reads Top 5 picked!

The top five have been picked and Chat Noir Books has our annual deal buy all 5 book before Feb 28th 2011 and get 10% off the Canada Reads Titles!! They make a a great Christmas Gift!



Ali Veshi defends The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

Debbie Travis defends The Birth House by Ami McKay

George Laraque The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou

Sara Quin Essex County by Jeff Lemire

Lorne Cardinal Unless by Carol Shields

The Hunger Games

Check out this great piece of fan art!

Movember Day 19 - Cardigans and glasses

Movember Day 18 - A Man With Out a Mustache

Nico Rogers Book Release Tomorrow Night!

Nico was in the store earlier today going over the final preparations for his book release tomorrow evening. As you can see Nico is pretty excited and so are we!

We have local blues legend, Dave Paterson along with the stores own Offical Czar of the obscure, transcendental, sphinxlike knowledge, and all around Amazing musician Mark Bradford! The two musical masters will be backing up Nico as he reads from his new book "The Fetch".

Drew Gauley of Good Gauley Productions will also be on hand taping this historical event!

Fresh Roast Coffee!!

Just received a new shipment of Coffee from the Las Chicas Del Cafe! Mmmmmm I can smell freshly roast coffee all over the store!

We have brought in two new flavoured coffees: Frosty Nights - Toffee based flavour with hints of Hazelnut and Cinnamon! I am not a big fan of Hazelnut, but man does this stuff smell good! I even caught Jenn huffing the coffee bag! Also new is the las Chicas Del Cafe Caramel Flavoured Coffee!

We also have new copies of the Las Chicas Del Cafe Newsletter available at the coffee bar. The Las Chincas Del Cafe newsletter is a great way to find out where your Coffee comes from and how buying coffee from us here at Chat Noir Books helps out the coffee growers and picks down in Nicaragua.!

Movember Day 10: On the Razors edge.

So this whole shaving thing every night is the pits! Last night while lathering up, I dropped my wedding ring down sink drain!! Luckily, I have big fingers which means a big ring, so I was able to unscrew the goose neck and retrieve my ring out of the plumbing. This of course took about an hour of looking around for tools and then painstakingly reaching into the small space behind the sink to unscrew the goose neck. All said and done I got my ring back; lathered up and finished my shave.

Now I am not used to shaving every night, as I usually wear a beard and neither is my skin, which has been getting a lot of razor burn lately! I mentioned this to my friend and teammate Mark Bradford who is also participating in Movember this month and he suggest that I try using some body butter after I shave as it has helped him cut down on the razor burn. Not a bad idea.

So last night after flushing my ring down the drain and then retrieving it and shaving, I decided to take Mark's advice and see if I could find some of the raspberry body butter that I had received as a present last Christmas. Unfortunately Jenn was already asleep so I couldn't ask her where it was or make too much noise as I didn't want to wake her up. So I turned on my bed side lamp to find said body butter. I couldn't find it. I was able to find the vanilla stick of body butter I had given Jenn for her Birthday though. Surely she wouldn't want me to suffer, or be waken up and asked where my body butter was. Plus she was the one who signed me up for this month of shaving and sharing a little bit of her body butter is just part of the package right? So I grabbed the stick of body butter, turned off my lamp and made my way to the bathroom where I applied the body butter to my sore razor burned bare chin.

Time check 11:30pm and with all the excitement I was still wide awake. Well I thought to myself "You're up, why not check and see who the Giller Prize winner is, and blog about it." A great idea right? Get the news out to the masses...or the few that read our blog and by the time I am done I should be sleepy and ready for bed. Wrong! So I start typing out the the news that Johanna Skibsrud is the 2010 Giller Prize Winner(congratulations!) , and a funny thing happens, my face starts becoming a little itchy. That's when I begin to sneeze and cough. "Oh No!" I think to myself "What was in that body butter I grabbed?!" I picked up the body butter which is sitting beside the computer screen waiting for me to bring it back upstairs. I read what I though said vanilla body butter and realize that the body butter I have applied to my face is not just vanilla but also has some essential oils included in it as I well. Which I am allergic to of course. The things I do to my face for Prostate Cancer Awareness. Only 21 more days to go.

Johanna Skibsrud 2010 Giller Prize Winner

Johanna Skibsrud has been named the 2010 winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel The Sentimentalists.

Johanna Skibsrud’s debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud’s narrator maps her father’s past.

Napoleon Haskell lives with Henry in the town of Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath which lie the remains of the former town. Henry is the father of Napoleon’s friend Owen, who died fighting in Vietnam. When her life comes apart, Napoleon’s daughter retreats to Casablanca and is soon immersed in the complicated family stories that lurk below the surface of everyday life. With its quiet mullings and lines from Bogart, The Sentimentalists captures a daughter’s wrestling with a heady family mythology.

“The real beginning of this story,” says Skibsrud, “was a summer that I spent working on Flagstaff lake, a lake that covers four now submerged townships in northern Maine, and served as the inspiration for the lake and the buried town in my book. That fall, with the beginnings of a story in my head, my father began to speak for the first time about his experiences in the Vietnam War. I am still not sure exactly why he told me his story when he did, but I think it had to do – it was 2003 then – with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had been for some time stirring in him a deep anger toward a government willing to repeat the mistakes of the past at the expense of innocent people; soldiers as well as civilians.

My mother thinks that my father told me his stories because he knew that I would do something with them – what I did write, though, was not my father’s story, but my own. And it is not a true story. At its root, though, there are two true things. One is my father’s testimony following Operation Liberty II in 1967, in which he spoke out against the murder of a civilian woman by the Captain of his squad. The other is the feeling I got floating over the buried towns of Flagstaff Lake: a feeling of the way that everything exists in layers, that nothing disappears; it just gets hidden sometimes.”

The Fetch - Book Launch

Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Fetch by Nico Rogers.
Readings, live music, snacks and fun are on the agenda!

Nico Rogers The Fetch Book Launch
Friday, November 19, 2010 at 7:00pm
Chat Noir Books

Drawing on family recollections, interviews with elders and extensive research in archives and regional museums, The Fetch, Nico Rogers’ first book, is a brilliant hybrid—neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. This compelling volume of tales and prose poems contains a

broad range of characters. There is the slow-witted girl who has lost her mother and now has only the cow named Fatty for a friend; the hard-bitten captain of a schooner in recoil from the ways of his alcoholic father; the child born premature, swaddled in olive oil-soaked linen, placed in a pan and incubated in an oven. And so on, twenty-eight vignettes in all, all tightly written and highly evocative of outport Newfoundland before Confederation. Funny, tragic, and just.

Nico Rogers is a storyteller and performance artist, and has appeared at writing and folk festivals across the country, as well as on TV and radio. He has taught writing and literature in post-secondary institutions in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Edmonton and now lives in Toronto, where he is working on a novel which will be a thematic continuation of The Fetch.

Canada Reads Top 10 picked!

Alright folks they asked us to vote for this years 2010 Canada's Reads books list and they gave us the top 40 and now they have narrowed it down to the top 10!

Now it is up to the five celebrity panelists to choose their book and defend it during the Canada Reads debates in February. Unfortunately we will have to wait until Wednesday, November 24 for the books and panelists to be revealed.


The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis

The Birth House by Ami McKay

The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall

Essex County by Jeff Lemire

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden

Unless by Carol Shields

FEST Presents -Force of Nature the David Suzuki Movie

I am really looking forward to seeing this movie!! Hopefully Jenn and I will be able to make it out to this one! The Film Event Society of Temiskaming presents "FORCE OF NATURE" The David Suzuki movie and the short film the "Junction Creek Clearwater Revival" on Monday Nov 22, 2010.

Copies of "The Legacy" by David Suzuki are also available here at the store!!






"What are you doing today to leave behind what you want to be remembered for tomorrow?" Join David Suzuki in theatres and on tour this fall with the release of Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, the first major film ever made about his life, and the companion book The Legacy.

"For the first time since life appeared on earth, one species – us – is single-handedly altering the physical,chemical and biological nature of earth. We have become a force of nature.”

– David Suzuki

Starwars Display -

Just found this great link. It is an instant No button! PRESS IN DIRE SITUATIONS! Very cool. It goes along with our Star Wars display!

NOOOOOoooooooooooooooo

Oh and next time your in the store check out the cool STAR WARS Millennium Falcon YT-1300 3D Owners Guide book! It ROCKS! Ahem... It is one of the books on my top 10 kids books for Christmas which is coming soon!

"What a piece of junk!"
"She'll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I've made a
lot of special modifications myself."
Get the keys to the most famous ship in the galaxy! Explore the Millennium Falcon layer-by-layer, from the clandestine cargo bays to the highly guarded secrets to its speed. Not to mention all the laser cannons, cockpit controls, and circuitry bays you can handle--plus expert notes on those "special modifications" from the master of the Millennium Falcon himself, Han Solo. A must-have for any Star Wars fan.

Fresh Sticky Buns!

Still one of my favourite cook books of all time, the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The recipes are really easy to prepare, you know what goes into the bread you eat, and you can basically have fresh bread all week long if you want.  

On Monday night I made up a fresh batch of dough and then put it into the fridge to chill. On Tuesday night the dough was nicely chilled and I was able to bake up a fresh batch of sticky buns, and we have been eating them all week!!

Now this recipe calls for lots of butter, and being a person who is Lactose intolerant, lots of butter is not a good thing! So next time I make this recipe I think I am going to try substituting the butter for Applesauce!

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking
Jeff Hertzberg MD | Zoe Francois | Mark Luinenburg

Movember Day 4 2010

Lets see on the Movember front, so far so good, I have been shaving at night and the Mo is coming in quite nicely. We have also raised about $200 so far for 'Prostate Cancer Canada' . The Chat Noir Books Team has also been growing! We are now sporting 4 members; Josh Huard, Mark Huard, Mark Bradford and myself(Paul McLaren). We are still looking for more mebmbers(Scott! I know you're growing a Mo!)

If you would like to help, you can either:

- Click this link http://ca.movember.com/mospace/653396/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account
- Write a cheque payable to 'Prostate Cancer Canada', referencing my name or Registration Number 653396 and mailing it to: Prostate Cancer Canada, Suite 306 145 Front Street East, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3, Canada.