New books

For the first time in quite a few years I didn't receive any books for Christmas. Oddly, I was quite ok with that as I have *cough* plenty of books on my tbr mountain and I really do want to read them. I did however pick up several on a shopping trip with my daughter and grand-daughter between Christmas and the New year.


First of all, this wonderful Collins atlas:

I love physical atlases which show all the mountains and plains and goodness knows what else and I don't own one... or rather I do but it's a Times one that belonged to my mother-in-law and is so massive I can hardly lift it off the shelf. My other atlas just shows the countries and is so ancient the USSR is still shown. So I wanted a new, normal size, physical atlas. Anyway, I saw this in The Works for £10 and just could not leave it there. I know it's a slightly odd thing to be a map freak but there ya go... I love my new atlas to bits.




Then this, also from The Works, costing me the princely sum of £3:

This is The Traveller's Daybook compiled by Fergus Fleming. It gives an excerpt from various books of travel writing for every day of the year. Travellers such as Thor Heyerdahl, Nansen, Isabella Bird, Charles Darwin as well as less obvious people like Ted Hughes, Evelyn Waugh, E.M. Forster are featured. I plan to read this through the year - have already started in fact - and have a feeling I'll end up with a lot of new authors to try when I get to the end. I even wonder if I might want to read it every year.





Next, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper.

I've been after this biography for a while, waiting to see it in the library or a charity shop, and lo and behold there it was in a British Heart Foundation shop for £1.50. If you're patient this can happen quite a lot... sadly, I'm not always patient enough. I've read Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, his one fictional book, The Violins of Saint-Jacques and a volume of letters between him and Deborah Devonshire, In Tearing Haste. All these led me to believe he led a very exciting life so I was very pleased to find this as I gather it's a very good biography.




Next, The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst:

Several generations of Stevensons, starting with Robert Stevenson, apparently built every lighthouse around the Scottish coast. The writer, Robert Louis Stevenson was his grandson but before him the name of Stevenson was synonymous with lighthouse building. This is their story. I bought this from Amazon before Christmas, partly because I've wanted to read it for a while but also I thought it would do nicely for the Scottish reading challenge I'm doing this year.






And last but not least, On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby:

I've read several books by travel writer, Eric Newby, and enjoyed them all, especially Love and War in the Apennines. I didn't know he'd done a tour of the Mediterranean countries with his wife, using all kinds of transportation, and written this book about their experiences. Having read Carol Drinkwater's book where she did something similar, but based on the olive tree, I had to have this and nabbed a copy from Amazon Marketplace. It's 500 pages but I think I will love it.

And the good thing about all of these books (apart from the atlas) is that they all qualify for Mount TBR 2017.

~~~oOo~~~