Well, my addiction to book buying gets no better and in fact is probably getting somewhat worse. You see, I have discovered that it is possible to source second-hand paperbacks from Amazon's subsidiary sellers at ridiculously cheap prices. Starting at 1p (yes, that's £0.01!) plus the statutory £2.75 p&p, that makes a grand total of £2.76 for a paperback. The quality is usually higher than the second-hand ones you get from charity shops (in fact, some are pristine) and c/s prices (depending on where you shop) are quite often higher. Plus serendipity plays a great part in charity shop finds - you get what's there: buying online you can source what you want. I still mine charity shops looking for books, so in fact they don't miss out, because I still buy as many books as ever from them. But the biggest buzz is when the anticipated package comes through the letter-box: I LOVE it!The Husband was finding the Paul Torday book he was reading a bit of a downer.....poor old Wilberforce obviously has his downhill path mapped out for him, and although he found it a gripping and well-written book, it didn't help the Husband to de-stress at the end of the day, so I picked him up acopy of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (which he hasn't actually started yet...) blurbed as 'the happiest book I have ever read' on the back cover. Should do the trick!
Having finished Dan Simmons Drood (excellent if weird), I am re-reading his Ilium and have purchased Children of the Night online (for the grand total of £2.76). That's a potential holiday book, but when I went out to lunch with my eldest daughter, we swung by Waterstones and I got a bit carried away at the 'three-for-two' counter (Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions). I actually went in for a book of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry - which I found, and is a thing of beauty in itself - so I spent rather more than I intended too. Hey ho! But the McCall Smith will be definitely accompanying me to Greece in the near future, The Bloody Chamber is just a masterpiece and I've been intending to read The Shadow of the Wind for some time (but had failed to find it in a charity shop).
When I had my last supervisory meeting, we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the writings of Evelyn Waugh, particularly his shorter works, and it occurred to me that a collection of his stuff would be an excellent holiday book. As I read in the Guardian recently, a collection of short stories is a sure-fire winner on holiday when the right book is crucial to one's enjoyment (see earlier posts): if one story fails to amuse, another most likely will. Certain that I'd find a copy - if not in a charity shop - then in a second-hand book shop (of which we have an abundance in York) I set off with Daughter #2 and the Bouncing Babba to dig one out. Sadly, it was an unsuccessful hunt, and not even Waterstones had a copy. I did, however, find another volume of short stories the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, (in the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council shop) which contains a wide spread of 20th century authors from Graham Green to Julian Barnes to Beryl Bainbridge. I'm not sure they're all that modern, but the publication date is 1988 (22 years old!). Looks like ideal holiday fodder, but even that did not stop me buying a second-hand copy of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh online when i got home. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold to boot. Ooopsy!
