Travel.....and More Books...

Half term looms (again) and the prospect of a few days in Barcelona is prompting me to find a suitable travel book for the journey. And the broken nights/early mornings - I'm suffering from ruptured sleep patterns again and whilst this can be a blessing sometimes (two extra hours of academic reading before the household stirs) it can be a bit of a pain away from home, when you're already pretty stressed-out and exhausted by travelling and unfamiliar surroundings. So, as usual, I'm looking for something not-too difficult, absorbing and well-written. Amidst all the 'serious' stuff that I'm reading at the moment, I picked up a discounted copy of The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson (£1.99), not a writer I've ever come across before. Reviews seem rather encouraging, mainly highlighting the pleasing style and unusual nature of the first-person narrative (not that first-person is unusual, the narrative is...) so that might be the one for the journey. Something for the Husband needs to be bought, and having exhausted the Neil Gaiman corpus, I'm going to have to trawl around Borders or the like, as he most certainly will not have the time to source one himself. The usual online book suppliers are certainly benefitting from my AHRC funding money: only this week I have ordered The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction and A.P.Hartley's What a Word!. This last is a 1930 first edition and I was surprised at the ridiculously cheap price (only a couple of pounds). I am deeply grateful that I can indulge - yes, that's the word - my passion for books, academic or otherwise, and am all too aware that many students are nowhere near as lucky as I have been in securing funding. But neither was I - for many years, and I think I was deeply scarred by husband #1's cold remark (when I asked if I could buy a paperback) that I 'already some had books'. Call this my therapy.