Category: book related

book related, The pile

Books Incoming: Mid July edition

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Ok, so it’s not quite the middle of the month yet, but it’s close enough – especially as I know there are some pre-orders due to arrive in the next few weeks so I want to get this batch out of the way!

As you can see it’s a modest (for me) haul this month – with two of them (Fear of Frying and The Chow Maniac) already off the to read pile and looking for a new home on the other bookshelves. The Vita Sackville West is also off the shelves for now – as I lent it straight out to mum, who is always interested in Gardens and the Bloomsbury Group. So that just leaves the second Jane Jeffries, The Wombles at Work (which came from the same book fair where I found the Vita book), my pre-order of the new Ben Aaronovitch and 1984 which was an impulse purchase from the Pride Month display at Foyles. And I realise typing this that the new Sarah Adler should be in this photo and isn’t, but as I’m several thousand miles away from home at the moment there is nothing I can do about it so consider Finders Keepers on the list too!

Have a great weekend!

book related, bookshops

Books in the Wild: Latest bumper releases…

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I’ve been in Foyles this week – and Gower Streey again and only two weeks on and and a few new things have appeared…

Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir is clinging on in the display but Al Pacino, Malcolm Gladwell and others have taken the rest of the slots.

The biggest change though is that they’ve moved the crime hardbacks, BLCCs and mass market cozy crimes and now we have three cases of horror…

On to Foyles and we’ve got the big name fiction including Nick Harkaway’s Smiley novel and the Ali Smith which I also spotted in Waterstones a couple of days early too.

And all the new crime and thrillers – including the Leonora Natrass I mentioned the other week.

And then the celebrity memoirs. I think we’ve pretty much got them all now, I can only think of one on my list that hasn’t arrived yet, but it’s a bit more niche.

I’ve included this one because I liked the look of the book about women in advertising.

And I know the question you’re all asking. Yes I did buy something. But actually it was in Foyles, as Gower Street didn’t have any of my target books. So that £30 voucher is still in my purse and I’m going back to Piccadilly next week for the big cozy crime section i resisted so valiantly last week…

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Books in the Wild: Waterstones Piccadilly (again)

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I think Thursday this week was the biggest book release day of the year, but sadly I haven’t made it into a bookshop in the last two days – but instead I was in Waterstones Piccadilly on Monday and had a good wander.

There is one of those 24th October releases on this photo though – some kind person had put The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year out on the shelves a couple of days early, so of course I snapped that up. Apart from that the romance display was still fairly Halloween orientated – with Casket Case, Haunt Your Heart Out, The Wedding Witch, My Vampire Plus-One and Morbidly Yours from this season’s crop of spooky releases.

I was really pleased to see Kingmaker on a table – and I’m hoping the fact that there’s only five copies means there were more and they’ve sold a bunch. I also keep coming across mentions of Pamela Harriman at the moment, but I’ve got no idea whether it’s because the book has got people talking or it’s that thing you get where you notice things you would have missed because you’ve recently encountered some form of media about them!

And finally, on the new and reviewed history shelf has three of the history hardbacks from this autumn’s releases that I’m interested in – namely the new Helen Castor and Dan Jones, who are two historians whose work I find really interesting and readable even if their areas of expertise are different to the periods that I am usually the most interested in, and then The Scapegoat again, which I mentioned last week.

And that’s your lot. I will endeavour to make it into a bookshop this week to see what else I can spot from the autumn new releases. After all I’m soon going to have to come up with a list of books I’d like for Christmas. Oh and I found a Waterstones voucher in my purse today from my Christmas gifts last year, that I only have six weeks left to spend…

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Books in the Wild: Foreign translations

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Mixing it up a little bit this weekend, but as well as looking at the book selections at the airport and the English language offers in any bookshops I encounter I also take a look at the books I can spot in translation – and the different covers they get… or otherwise. So here are a few that I’ve spotted on the last few trips.

Lets start with some Italian Julia Quinn! These are non-Bridgertons including some of my favourites – like What Happens in London and The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever. I’m always interested to see historical romance covers because they are so wildly different between the UK and the US even before you get to translated versions. In the UK these originally had line-drawn almost cartoon-y covers and now have been repackaged with headless torso photographs of men and or women to match the reissued Bridgerton books which are now getting the couples from the show on the cover as their series happens.

I thought this was really interesting – as well as the artwork on Husband Material, Love, Theoretically and the Ana Huangs, they’ve also kept the English titles. Now with Husband Material I can sort of understand that, because it’s so built in, but the others you could have changed it surely? All of these have the same cover design in the US and the UK so I’m wondering if this is a TikTok influenced thing: Have they kept the titles that people might have seen on English language BookTok? I don’t know, but I find it very, very interesting.

From Italy to Spain now, and next up is a previous Book of the Week – Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, which has got the US cover, which I just think is too lairy compared to the UK one. I like the idea of the formal and fancy room, because it is a rich people problems book, I just think this is an ugly set of colours!

And finally here we have Spanish Sally Rooneys, which have got the English language cover concepts, but the titles translated and a few tweaks. Some of these have the same editions in the UK and the US and some don’t – I’m not sure which came first or whether it’s changed as she’s grown in popularity, but I do really love the covers her books get – they’re so distinctive and eye-catching.

Here endeth this Saturday’s trip through cover design, I hope you’ve enjoyed it – it may make a reappearance at some point in the future you never know…

book related, books, bookshops

Books in the Wild: Heathrow Terminal 5

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You all knew this was coming once you saw I’d been to Lagos didn’t you? I don’t go to Heathrow very often – it’s not the most convenient airport for us for where we live if we’re sorting our own holiday out, and package holidays don’t tend to leave from there if we’re doing that. So I was excited to get a look at what Heathrow had to offer. And then it turned out that what Terminal 5 had to offer was disappointing. At least at the end of the terminal we were at before we had to hustle off down to our gate.

So in the interests of completeness, these are the new book options they had – everything else was backlist or magazines, and we all know that’s not what I’m there for. So this is the paperback selection – where you can see that a lot of the last year’s big hardback releases – including stuff I liked like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and the fourth Thursday Murder Club – are not out in paperback and near the top of the charts.

That theme continues on the second paperback case – with last year’s Emily Henry, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy and Monica Heiny in there, along with the tie-in edition of Romancing Mr Bridgerton and This Summer Will Be Different by Carley Fortune, which I would have bought if I hadn’t already just bought the Kindle edition because it was on offer.

On to the airport exclusives, and you will see that I am already doing pretty well on the, – and a lot of the stuff that I would have bought, I already have. Like this year’s Emily Henry and the new Anthony Horowitz. This was the point where I started panicking that I wasn’t going to find anything I wanted, and I hadn’t brought a paperback with me. Not that it would turn out to matter, as I didn’t have a lot of reading time, and the time I did have I spent on the Kindle. But I didn’t know that at that point!

And this photo is awful, but there wasn’t a very wide aisle and I was crammed in and this is the best I could do. But this is the point where I heaved a sigh of relief, because The Ministry of Time was the book I was hoping to find at the airport – it’s the buzzy book of this summer and I think it has the potential to be this year’s equivalent of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow if you know what I mean. So I snaffled that, and then had to figure out what else. And I did find another one for the offer – but I’m going to tease you and make you wait until the next Books Incoming to see what!

Have a great weekend everyone – enjoy the bank holiday if you have one where you are.

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Bookshop visit: Óbidos Part 1

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Well as you know I’ve been on my travels recently, so this Saturday and next it’s the highlights of my trip to Obidos’s bookshops… And part one is the Livraria de Santiago, because why not when it looks like this!

It’s an ex-church, it’s gorgeous and the book selection is excellent.

I mean look at it. It’s just such a nice mix of old and new, and it’s so full of books!

Here are the two ends of RF/Rebecca Kuang – do note that in Portuguese they’re both under RF Kuang.

Also there was a Mallory Towers omnibus and how could I not take a picture!

There’s also a fair few romance novels – in translation and by local authors – and plenty of YA. All in all, great fun.

And to finish, here’s the outside – which is out to keep the fact it’s a bookshop secret!

Happy Saturday everyone!

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Bookshop Visit: The Hedgehog Bookshop, Penrith

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Were we in the north recently? Did I find a bookshop to visit? Did I make a purchase? Yes on all counts. And it was a delightful bookshop so of course I’m writing about it!

The Hedgehog Bookshop has two floors of lovely books and goodies. The first floor has kids books and stationery and all that sort of thing. But upstairs is where the good stuff is on a book front from my point of view.

In one room there’s a nice comfy sofa with a hedgehog cushion where you can sit and peruse your choice from what seemed like a very thoughtfully curated selection of fiction, with something for practically anyone I would have thought.

There are best sellers, BookTok picks, recent top sellers, modern classics, evergreen picks and a big old selection of crime and mystery of various types. This was not the only crime bookshelf…

And in the other room there’s an eclectic mix of non-fiction, again with something for pretty much anyone across history, celebrity memoir, cookery, the whole lot.

My purchase was a book about the history of cathedral architecture which you could see in the bonus books incoming the other week. Have a great weekend.

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Books in the Wild: Back at Birmingham airport…

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You knew this was coming. I can’t go on holiday without trying to spot some books. We didn’t make it to a supermarket this time, so I don’t have any Spanish covers for English books this time, you’ll have to put yo with my general exasperation with the choices at the airport W H Smiths.

And it is Smiths, plural, beauty this is the best I could do from two of them – both good sized because I’m not counting the one tiny set of shelves in the one I went in before security. There are a lot of familiar suspects here I really struggled to find two books to buy – one of the reactions I ended up in two skips was because I couldn’t find what I wanted in the first one. So we have Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Lessons in Chemistry, The Thursday Murder Club and Really Good, Actually along with some crime that clearly too creepy for me!

And here we have even more creepy cover crime, more Richard Osman, a Robert Galbraith, some literary fiction and fantasy and the new Victoria Hislop.

This one is a little better, but I have In At The Deep End in the kindle backlog, the Lucy Score is in Kindle Unlimited (I even had it borrowed at the time even if I still haven’t read it), I’ve read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the new YA Ali Hazelwood along with even more Richard Osman, literary fiction and some Colleen Hoover.

And finally, some non-fiction. They had Arnie, and Guenter from Drive to Survive, Matthew Perry, Jada Pinkett Smith and finally the book I had been looking for – David Michell’s Unruly. And if I tell you that the copy you see is the only copy there was, you’ll understand why I felt lucky to get it, even if it was a bit bumped and the spine was already broken. At which point I went back and picked up a novel I hadn’t heard of before from one of the previous shelves, but I’m not telling you which, so it can be a surprise when it pops in Books Incoming!

My conclusion from all this is that our September holiday clearly happened after all the big autumn books for the airports came out, and this one was too soon for anything else to have supplanted them. Hopefully but next holiday though…

Have a great weekend!

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Books in the wild: Waterstones Piccadilly again…

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Do you remember how excited I got only a few weeks ago about the romance section at Waterstones Piccadilly? Well I went in this week to try and find the new Alexis Hall in the wild and guess what… it had gone! They’ve reorganised it all already and now it’s smaller (I think) and at the back. The whole of that front section is now Crime and Thriller. I have no words but I do have a few pictures.

I say it’s smaller but I’m not actually sure, it just felt more cramped. The photo above is the main section and then on the left there is a Pride section – which is a mix of fiction and non fiction LGTBQIA+ books – including some Alexis Hall but not the one I was looking for!

Then the main romance bit is to the right. I don’t think it was properly set up – there were still gaps all over place on shelves elsewhere on the floor and trolleys of books too as you can see in the picture below.

I only had about ten minutes to wander around – so I couldn’t properly dig into what had gone awol, but I thought I should probably do an update as I’d been so excited about the old configuration…

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Books Incoming: Mid-October

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Quite a restrained month to be honest, I’m fairly impressed with myself. One charity shop buy, one second hand purchase, one vintage store pick and then the two airport purchases which are on a separate photo because I lent them out to my dad as soon as I got home! Will the restraint last? Hard to tell given that there’s a lot of good stuff coming out at the moment, but I will try!