Book porn!

It's one of those strange weeks. My daughter is on holiday from work, which should mean no minding our grandson today and Friday and a nice few outings. We were off to Penzance on Monday, for instance, to visit relatives for the day. But you know what they say about the best laid plans? Our grandson went down with chicken pox on Friday which cancelled everything because not only is he contagious, we might be too and it's no use visiting people and giving them a present they don't really want! So. While waiting to see whether or not I have chicken pox I took a tour of the charity shops and market yesterday to see what book gems I could find to cheer myself up. And thus! some book porn.



This batch of five was on a table in the market marked 25p each or 5 for £1.

The Saffron Eaters is a book I've never heard of but I immediately realised from the title (the Cornish eat a lot of saffron cake) and the cover that it must be set in Cornwall. Indeed it is, a Cornish fishing village in fact, so I couldn't leave that behind.

Death Comes at the End is a totally unknown Agatha Christie book to me. But its background is ancient Egypt so I'm sure it'll be very readable.

The other two crime books, The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin and Something the Cat Dragged in by Charlotte Macleod are likewise totally unknown but they looked interesting and at 20p if they're no good they can go to the charity shop.

Lastly, Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron is a travel book, set, obviously, in China.

For the princely sum of £1, I didn't think that was a bad haul.



And then I had a mooch around the charity shops and Waterstones.

Waterstones yielded the new issue of their excellent book magazine (which you get free if you have one of their loyalty cards) and I treated myself to Eldest by Christopher Paolini. I'm currently reading the first in this series, Eragon and like it well enough to buy the sequel. The cover alone is almost worth the money...

The charity shops threw up three gems.

Dragons of Spring Dawning by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which is book three of the Dragonlance series, the first of which I read recently. Just have to find book two now.

Corsets to Camouflage is a non-fiction book which shows the role of women in the wars of the 20th century, by the renowned BBC war corresspondant, Kate Adie.

I think I'm most pleased with my last find. It's an omnibus edition of Wave me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War edited by Anne Boston and Hearts Undefeated: Women's Writing of the Second World War edited by Jenny Hartley. The former is fiction and I saw it blogged about somewhere but can't remember where. I decided not to buy it on Amazon but wait and see if it turned up. Well it did. And not only did I get the book I wanted, I also got the second book which is non-fiction writings from WW2 and every bit as good as the first book. I'm well satisfied with that result!

So, without spending a fortune I cheered myself up considerably. (The trouble is... I also increased the tbr mountain by nine volumes!)