Back in January, the fate of Glad Day Bookshop didn't look good. As an independent bookstore — a niche one, at that — Glad was plagued with a series of troubles including operating amidst the financial burden of an ongoing battle with the Ontario Film Review Board.

We've been known to post the occasional timelapse or two, but this "behind the scenes" look at TYPE Books at night is a refreshing change from the skyline panoramas and traffic shots that often make their way into these sequences. Kind of like A Night at the Museum for books, this short stop motion film from Sean and Lisa Ohlenkamp injects life into a space that would otherwise quietly await the following day's customers.

Despite the relative youth of 2012, this year already appears set to be a bad one for Toronto bookshops. Continuing a trend that has seen the closure of Pages, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, and Ballenford Books, Quill & Quire reports that the Book Mark is set to shut its doors on or before January 21st. The oldest independent bookshop in the city, despite a few location changes, the store has been in steady operation for over 45 years. In a press release issued earlier today, owner Sue Houghting explains that if the Book Mark's stock runs short prior to the scheduled closure date, she'll close up early. Talk about unceremonious endings.

Books worth reading about Toronto have been published at a steady pace over the last few years, such that the prospective buyer now faces an array of quality titles to choose from. I've already covered some of these offerings in a top 10 list published in fall 2010, but there's plenty that have come to press since then and others that didn't, for whatever reason, make my initial cut.

As was the case with the last post, I've placed emphasis on recently published texts that are easy enough to find in local bookstores, and that generally won't break the bank. It is, after all, past the mid-point of December, and I hope this list might help out those looking to buy last-minute gifts for the Toronto-lover on their holiday list. So while William Dendy's Lost Toronto is required reading for the true Torontophile, I leave it off the list below because you'll have to hope to find it in a used bookstore or order it from a vintage bookseller online. Similarly, Eric Arthur's No Mean City, also a foundational Toronto text, is absent because it's become a bit more difficult to find of late and isn't cheap at $40+ for a trade paper back.

Here are eight books about Toronto worth reading.

On Monday evening, the Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Public Library played host to Jeffrey Eugenides, an influential Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist making his first appearance to Toronto. Connected to the hysterical realism movement of writers like his Brown University classmate Rick Moody, friend Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace, Eugenides is known for his 1993 book The Virgin Suicides (later adapted into a film by Sofia Coppola) and 2002's Middlesex, which won him a Pulitzer and a place in Oprah's Book Club.

Although it'd get some steep competition from the Historical Atlas of Toronto, Mark Osbaldeston's Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City That Might Have Been is probably the most fascinating book about this city to be released in the last 10 years. It's one of those texts that I've had occasion to refer to more times than I can remember. As a history of projects that never came to fruition, it offers rare insight into the various decisions and political processes that have determined the shape of our city — for better and worse.