Slightly belatedly as we’ve been back a few weeks now, but for this Saturday’s post I’ve got my thoughts on the bookshop selection at Birmingham airport.
I’m going to start with a disclosure: I was disappointed with the selection this time. I think that’s partly because I’ve actually done quite a good job of getting (and reading) advance copies of some of the autumn releases this year, but I think there was actually quite a lot of repetition in what was here and not as much variety. This is the top of the airport fiction chart and I’ve already read the Lucy Foley Miss Marple, I’m pretty convinced that Yesteryear and Taipei Story will have big Kindle price drops at some point and I don’t want to read them enough to pay these prices and then we have a lot of thrillers that aren’t really my thing.
In the bottom half of the chart you can see some of the stuff from the top half filling some gaps (or is it vice versa?) and then the Hawthorne and Horowitz that I read back when it came out in the spring, and the Mel Giedroyc (twice!) which I read and (surprisingly) really, really loathed. The Kathryn Stockett has had mixed reviews and is really long so I skipped on that, and I’ve actually already got the Richard Osman so I was pretty short on choices for the traditional holiday Buy-one-half-price.
Moving to the airport non-fiction, we have my two purchases (as you know) Regime Change and The Cauldron, but I’ve already read the Kennedys and the Windsors thanks to a Kindle offer, I still haven’t read the Miriam Margolyes book I already own, Journey across Japan is actually a follow up and the Patrick Radden Keffe is about the death of a child and although the other books of his that I’ve read have been really good, I know that I’m not in the headspace to read about that. I was tempted by the Lucy Worsley, but I wasn’t sure how much new stuff would be in there, and I was also tempted by The Beckhams, which is by Alexander Larman who has written some books on the Royals that I’ve read – but it was really skinny and the print was large so I didn’t think it was worth it!
Swan Song by Charles Spencer was the big release at that point – and I don’t know if you can tell but that’s in actual hardback format, not airport paperback, which is why I’m including this one. I’m not bothering with anyt of the other paperback-paperback photos, because it really was the usual suspects – Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and other Taylor Jenkins Reid books, lots of Colleen Hoover, Frieda McFadde etc and also quite a bit of Alexandra Potter. I had been hoping for the latest Three Dahlias or the new John Green Hollywood Ending in Airport format but no such joy.
Hey ho – if you’re going through an airport soon, may your bookshop visit be more satisfying!
