Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times, week 7

It's time for another round of Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times which is being hosted by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness.

The idea is to share your bookshelves with other bloggers. Any aspect you like:

1. Home.
2. Books in the home.
3. Touring books in the home.
4. Books organized or not organized on shelves, in bookcases, in stacks, or heaped in a helter-skelter fashion on any surface, including the floor, the top of the piano, etc.
5. Talking about books and reading experiences from the past, present, or future.

Whatever you fancy as long as you have fun.

I've chosen another random pile of books for today. I don't know about anybody else but I really like collecting together a few random books, usually with some kind of connection - sometimes it's a bit tenuous - that I would like to read soon and usually that doesn't happen so I must just be addicted to creating interesting piles of books, that's all I can put it down to really.

Anyway, the two books at the bottom are Back Door to Byzantium and Watersteps Through France by Bill and Laurel Cooper. This is a couple who decided to take a barge across the North Sea and down through France and then Germany via the Danube to The Black Sea. I love reading about people having these kind of advdntures even though I'm not brave enough to do it myself.

Next, Notes from the Cévennes by Adam Thorpe. I gather the author has lived in France for 25 years and this is just one of his books. I must look into the others. I bought this a couple of years ago in a lovely indie bookshop in Arundel. (Click for a bigger view of this lovely town.)

It's one of those little shops on the right, at the top, before the castle wall starts. The town also had the most wonderful secondhand bookshop.

Next, Daughters of the House by Michele Roberts is a fiction book about two sisters growing up in Normandy after the war. I think it's a family secrets kind of book. I read about this one on Yvonne's blog 'Fiction Books'... here.

Next a couple of random books about France and the French, I'll Never Be French by Mark Greenside, this one's about a New Yorker trying to make a life in Brittany, and For Better, For Worse by Damien and Siobhan Horner which is about barging on the French canals.

Lastly, The Skeptical Romancer by Somerset Maugham and What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin. Both of the these are a mix of travel writing and essays and are just the sort of thing I like to dip in and out of.

All of these are tbrs and they sum up my non-fiction and fiction reading tastes in a nutshell and give me a lot of pleasure even though I haven't read them yet. It's like keeping something in reserve as a treat because you just know they're going to be excellent.

~~~oOo~~~