Book, $5

There are two books I always buy whenever I come across them at an op shop. One is the baby-care manual Baby Love and the other is Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Over the years I’ve bought and given away multiple copies of each. You see, offering advice is a delicate business. It’s only natural to want to help when someone you know says they’re at their wits’ end over a situation you’ve wrestled with before. At the same time, you don’t want to morph into the kind of self-styled expert people run screaming from at parties. So I just hand over my current copy of whichever tome with a nonchalant “This helped me…” and leave it at that. As for life’s other quandaries, I’m stumped.