Happy Saturday everyone, I’ve been to a new bookshop!
I was in Angel for an event and took the chance to dive into Upper Street bookshop on my way back to Central London, and of course I bought books…
Let’s start with the fact that I really liked the selection of books. They had the popular stuff that I was expecting but alongside some stuff I hadn’t seen before too.
I’m particularly talking about the non-fiction selection where there was some really interesting stuff that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I mean I’m sure they had it, but just not on the first table inside the door. And yes this is the selection where I found the books bought!
I love a blind date with a book stand too – and outside is great. I have so many books that I don’t dare buy them though because when I have I always get a book I already have! I had a lovely time wandering around, if I have a criticism, it’s that I would like a better romance selection and more crime and mystery books (that aren’t in the blind date section) but I could say that about a lot of bookshops and I get that they have to stock what they sell.
I’ve been wandering the bookshops again in search of new books to add to the ever expanding want to read list on Goodreads, and I’m back with my results. The good news is that they’re all hardbacks, so I was able to resist buying them because of a) price and b) the fact that hardbacks impulse buys sit on my shelves for a lot longer than paperbacks. And paperbacks can sit there for a long time…
Honestly non-fiction hardbacks are the hardest thing for me to resist, but also the things that take me longest to read. Here you can see the new Hallie Rubenhold which I mentioned in my 2025 preview back in January, but also Edward White’s Dianaworld which I hadn’t heard about until I saw it in the store – and then came home to find a review of it in the latest Literary Review which only made me want to read it more. I also hadn’t come across The Fall of the House of Montague before and that looks right up my street too – it’s all about the collapse of the fortunes of the Dukes and Earls of Manchester across four generations. I’m also tempted by The Dream Factory, but given that I already have at least four books about Shakespeare (or his plays) on the bookshelf waiting to be read I didn’t even let myself pick it up!
This selection of hardback fiction was facing the entrance – I really want to read the Emily Henry but I’m restraining myself because I’m fairly convinced there will be an airport paperback version of this that I can buy next time I fly somewhere, if there isn’t a deal on the ebook first. Open Heaven is described as “heartrending” and I think we know I’m not in the market for that, the Isabel Allende sounds interesting, but I still have at least one of hers on the Kindle waiting to be read but the Sayaka Murata sounds interesting – about a world where most babies are conceived by artificial insemination and marriages are sexless – but also I’m still not in the market for dystopian future stories!
And then finally we’ve got Julie Chan is Dead in the wild, The Marble Hall Murders – which like the Emily Henry I’m hoping will have an airport paperback version (although it is huge and possibly unmanageable as a physical copy), and the new S J Parris which is the start of a new series and which I have on my kindle waiting for me to read. Apart from that we have a few thrillers that are clearly too scary for me and Fair Play by Louise Hegarty which is a murder mystery where two thirds of the blurb sounds like I would like it and then the final sentence makes me wonder: Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play is the puzzle-box story that brilliantly lays bare the real truth of life – the terrifying mystery of grief.
I’m sure you didn’t think that I was going to do a whole week based around the seaside without giving you a bookshop visit did you? In fact it was one of the first places that we went after we arrived – as we walked past it on our way from the railway station to the seafront and of course the early visit meant I could leave the purchases at the hotel along with my rucksack so I didn’t have to carry them all around with me!
Lets start with the fact that this is a big store, over a lot of floors and they’ve got a really large selection of new hardback fiction right as you come in the door. And as ever, I’m focussing this post on the stuff that interests me – that I read and that I’ve been looking out for and not on the whole store! Brighton has got quite a distinct identity – it was the first place to elect an MP from the Green Party back in 2010, it’s got lots of students and a large LGBTQIA community so I was interested to see their book selections.
And across those new fiction shelves, as well as recent releases I’ve read and written about, like the Curtis Sittenfeld short stories collection and The Rest of Our Lives, there’s also stuff on my pile like The Three Lives of Cate Kay and books that I’ve seen reviewed in the latest edition of Literary Review like Call Me Ishmaelle and the new Katie Kitamura.
And the table next to it has got the really new stuff – like that third Magpie Murders, which I really want to read but is Very Very Big in hardback and so I’m going to have to wait for the Kindle edition to drop to a sensible price. And there’s also the new Gregory Maguire on the far left there – Elphie – where he’s returning to the world he created in Wicked although I have to say I thought he’d covered Elphaba’s childhood in that but it’s a long, long time since I (tried to) read that.
I am of course all about the crime at the moment because romance moving towards Romantasy and contemporary romance having ever younger protagonists is not really what I want right now, so here we have some mystery books. And I was impressed/horrified at how many of this lot I’ve read already – or have on the pile. ON this side I’ve read the SJ Bennet, the Richard Osman and the Anthony Horowitz and I have the Golden Spoon and Vera Wong (as previously mentioned) on the Kindle waiting to be read. I also want to read Displeasure Island which is the sequel to Grave Expectations, but haven’t bought it yet.
Even more crime here – and my hit rate is lower, but it does include one of my purchases which was of course A Case of Mice and Murder – but also Seven Lively Suspects and another Canon Clement along with a bunch of covers that look too dark for me, although I am trying to adjust my snap judgments on that front after Ruth Galloway.
And finally, this had the new Vinyl Detective which I would have bought and read if my pre-order wasn’t already at home and the final Maisie Dobbs which is now out in paperback. I was going to do the romance section, but basically, I’d read so few of them that it felt a little bit pointless. I would say I should try and change that, but we all know how big my To-Read Pile is right now so I’m not making any promises.
As we all know book trends swing back and forth – and things fall in and out of fashion, and wandering around bookshops you notice things changing. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen things like the change in romance covers to the illustrated ones that started with Leni Kauffman’s covers for people like Olivia Dade and Ashley Herring Blake, but now stretches to almost every romance. Some times it from reading the blurbs – and noticing that the age of the protagonists is going down and most of romance is essntially now what was New adult. Or that there are less and less historicals – even though Bridgerton is massive.
And that leads me to the point of this post: Foyles have swapped the Crime/mystery section and the sci fi fantasy section over – and now the crime is the smaller area. And yes I did count. Last time I was in here – and in fact as long as I can remember – this area above was the crime and mystery section.
It’s a straight switch – Crime is now wrapping around the outside. What’s made the difference here? Romantasy. It’s all the romantasy books I think. The romance section is still mostly contemporary and historical and they’ve put all the romantasy in here with the more traditional (so to speak) Fantasy. And there’s a really interesting article about Fantasy and Romantasy here from Reactor.
And I did have a root around and had my first sighting in the wild of the new Penguin Classic Edition of Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. Which I nearly bought but managed to resist this time!
I’ve been wandering around bookshops again… and this time it’s an indie: Quinns Bookshop in Market Harborough. And I’m going to call this one small but perfectly formed, because it’s got a really well chosen selection in quite a small space.
This is the delightful window table display – you’ll spot a few that I’ve read there – like A Case of Mice and Murder and The Cracked Mirror– and real mix of other things, including a couple of tasters of new releases in Murders at Gull’s Nest and 10 Marchfield Square. Murder at Gull’s Nest is a 1950s-set, seaside murder mystery featuring a former nun and 10 Marchfield Square is a cozy mystery set in a small residential square in London that says it’s The Maid meets Only Murders in the Building. So I think we can agree that I’m probably going to read both of those at some point. But I’m really trying hard not to buy hardback fiction at the moment.
Opposite the window display we’ve got some paperback fiction, including The Ministry of Time (Which I really need to get around to) and The Cat Who Saved the Library (which I read the other week) and the intriguing looking The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wasteland, which is a fantasy novel about a trip on the Great Trans-Siberian Express between Beijing and Moscow.
I find the easiest way for me to assess bookshops on this front is the Crime selection – because it’s where I’m reading most and a lot of what I read is relatively recently published. And you can see they’ve got the crime sign up in the back corner there, and I was really impressed with this – there’s a stuff from the authors that you’ll see all over the place, some less obvious stuff that I haven’t come across or seen around before and then some stuff that I’ve read from authors or series that you don’t see in shops with selections of this size as much – or don’t see in hardcopy much at all.
And if you’re wondering: yes I did nearly by a paperback copy of a book I had in the kindle backlog that I had never seen in the flesh before. It would not be the first time, but I ended up buying something completely fresh to me – I could tell it wasn’t the first in the series, but I liked the sample that I read so I bought it any way!
They’ve also got an art section and some lovely bookish gifts – I bought some wrapping paper but it was hard to resist the tote bags. Basically the only thing that stopped me was the fact that I’ve got so very, very many of them and Him Indoors is getting antsy about the numbers lingering around the house. And he’s already ignoring the to-read shelf overspill so I can’t try it on too much…
We’ve been taking advantage of the nicer weather and the early starts on a Sunday for flyaway start to the Formula One and MotoGP seasons to go and do some of the (relatively) local National Trust and English Heritage properties. And so of course I’ve been in the gift shops and looking at what books are on offer so that I could report back. And voila!
Lets start with English Heritage’s Kirby Hall. It’s a very small shop and this was about it – Kirby Hall is mostly in ruins and so it’s a spend a couple of hours here, doesn’t have a cafe sort of property. I don’t have a photo of the shelves on the left for some reason, but you can see the Collins guide to English Castles and there were a couple of DK kids books too along with puzzle books and the like for children. Kirby Hall was built in the Tudor period, so it’s no surprise that their main offer for adults is around the Tudors. And we’ve got a couple of overview books for the period as well as a Henry VIII biography from a respected historian and two of Alison Weir’s Tudor Novels (as opposed to her non-fiction works).
Next up we have National Trust and their selection at Baddesley Clinton. This is a much bigger property – the house has been there since the medieval period but was still lived in into the twentieth century (albeit with loads of changes over the years) and it’s got gardens, a lake and a stable and barn complex that’s been turned into a cafe, gift shop, plant shop and second hand book shop. It’s also not far from Birmingham and has a lot of visitors
Most of the shop is the usual mix of local food and drink gifts, outdoors-y things and National trust merch, but they’ve also got these two cases of books. And as you can see it’s a lot of cookbooks, puzzle books and gardening books with a few National Trust books that round up their properties on various fronts – I’ll admit I was tempted by National Trust on Screen which is a guide to their properties that have been most used in television and movies. But I had already bought three books, because the reason that there isn’t any fiction really here is….
The second-hand bookshop. This is just one bit of it – the crime section – and as you can maybe tell it’s in the old stables, with the horse stalls used to separate out the different types of books. This was a fairly ok split between non-fiction and fiction, and all of my purchases came in the crime section – mostly because I went through that bit first and they wanted cash, which I was running out of! It’s always interesting to see what crops up in these NT book shops – it can sometimes be brilliant, but you can also get the shops that have loads and loads of (probably) out of date non-fiction or very aged and worthy classics and almost antiquarian books which are not at all my thing. This one was somewhere in the middle – three books that I bought, but nothing that I could find in any of the series that I’m trying to pick up at the moment.
So there you are – a tale of two bookshops. I’ve got a list of places that I want to go to this year so hopefully I’ll be able to report back on some more as the summer arrives.
I finally made it into a supermarket with more than a single carcase of books, and so here I am with a quick update on what’s in the supermarket (and how much the selection has shrunk). This is my nearest Big Tesco. They used to have one side of a whole aisle in books, but things have changed. I used to be able to go in there and pick up however many books were in their deal no problem. Less so these days and the deals have got less good too – no blanket 2 for £x any more. Hey ho.
So what we have here I would say are the usual suspects – dominated by thrillers and murder mysteries from the big names, with a few bits of women’s fiction, romance, and non-fiction thrown in. There’s the new Ali Hazelwood and the Vera Wong sequel – which would have been my purchases if you’d held me down and said I have to buy something – but I still haven’t read the first Vera Wong (note to self, do sort that out) and the Deep End has a heroine who is a college athlete and I’m not sure I can cope with such young protagonists at the moment!
I was starting to worry that this was going to be the first book selection I’ve seen in ages with no Richard Osman, but there they are on the top left – just The Thursday Murder Club books though, no We Solve Murders. This was about the point where I started thinking what a strange mix of books this was – with new releases all mixed in with the older books and no “best sellers” list visible to explain why. I guess this is probably down to the fact that it’s a smaller selection, but if there’s logic to the display, it escapes me!
And finally we have a small selection of hardbacks and it’s the same sort of genres but the mix is a bit difference – this leans more into the women’s fiction end of things, as do the paperbacks at the bottom half of the shelf. I was hoping they might have the Anthony Horowitz on a good deal, but no. There’s a lot of sagas here of various types and other historical fiction. I feel like this Tesco has always had a lot of sagas, so maybe that’s what the locals like around here, although if you’re a saga reader my experience is that you also tend to be a fast reader and so whether this would keep you happy for many weeks I’m not sure!
And as a bonus contrast: These are from my local little-Asda:
I think this might actually be a better selection – it’s got the new Rebecca Yarros and the previous two, along with some Cassandra Clare and other hardback Romantasy. It’s also got a few more recent of the paperback releases.
Like Tesco, this has sagas but it’s also got a lot of Sarah J Maas to continue the romantasy trend that Tesco was almost totally missing. And it’s got a better selection of romance too – especially considering the size of display. And going back to my earlier point about the reduction in size of the book selection at the Big Tesco – this is one less carcase of books at the Asda than at the Tesco and one is a 24 hour mega market and the other is not.
Happy Saturday everyone, this weekend we’re celebrating the fact that I found a new bookshop near me!
The Reading Tree is a second hand bookshop in part of an old military depot that’s been converted into workspaces for local businesses – some are offices or workshops, others are shops. It’s not as big as Bookends/Bookcase in Carlisle (but honestly what is) but it’s probably the biggest second hand selection I’ve found near me.
As you can see it’s a really interesting building from the inside – the bookshop in in the upstairs (there are antiques and vintage shops downstairs in this building) and it’s got big windows and loads of light. It was a depot for ordnance, so if I was a betting person I would say that the roof looks so light and flimsy (relative to the rest of it) because of the risk of explosion – like buildings that store or manufacture fireworks: light roof so if there’s an explosion it goes up not out.
Anyway, what you can’t see here is that there’s a cafe too so that you can sit and read your new purchases. In terms of the stock it’s a real mix of relatively recent releases in lightly used condition and older books. It’s got a mix of fiction and non-fiction – it’s probably 40% of the space to the fiction, but given that fiction books are often smaller than non-fiction ones (especially cook books and military history ) it’s probably aout 50/50 split overall.
We wandered in here as part of a walk along the canal, so for once I didn’t buy any books because I had to walk another couple of miles back to the car carrying anything I bought and I only had a tiny bag (with no space for anything else), but I endorse this flow chart and I will be back…
Here we go again, this week’s Saturday post is basically the result of me wandering around a lot of bookshops over the last few weeks and having some thoughts about it and about me and my reading habits.
Firstly, I think we’re living in a really interesting time for cover design at the moment. I think we went through a whole phase of being able to work out pretty much what genre a book was in just by looking at the cover – and now: not so much. Or at least not so much at the moment. I mean we all know what I read most of the time, and I still picked up a bunch of these to read the backs because of the covers. And some of them were intriguing, but we all know that I’d buy one and it would sit on the shelves for actual years as I picked almost everything else to read first!
Moving towards stuff that I might actually read, we’ve got some new hardback crime fiction, which actually makes me feel guilty all over again – because I have Alex Hay’s last book, at least one Tom Hindle and the Oskar Jensen that Helle’s Hound is a sequel to still waiting to be read. Lets move on quickly before I feel any worse.
Having just said that I’m feeling bad for not reading things, this has the book I acutally bought on it – I was in Foyles on the Tuesday before Show Don’t Tell was published and was delighted to see it out early – and signed. So I bought it. And I’ve read it now. Sue me
Moving on, this is actually my local Waterstones and the tower they use for new hardbacks. This is the crime side and it is interesting to me that this is the first place (I think) that I’ve seen Steph Plum 31 in the flesh, which as it came out in the autumn is a surprise. It’s also the first time I’ve come across A Trial in Three Acts – which like the Curtis Sittenfeld was out on the shelves a few days early – this was taken last Saturday and it only came out officially two days ago. Sidenote: it’s enough to make me think twice about pre-ordering books if I might be able to get a copy from an actual bookshop a few days early, but authors need pre-orders. What a dilemma. Anyway, a Trial in Three Acts is a legal mystery about a murder committed live on stage. And as we all know I love a theatre-set mystery, so this just went onto my list of books to look out for at the airport! Also, I love the cover of A Stolen Heart, which it seems is the second book set in Soviet-controlled Kyiv in 1919. As we know, I like to read in order, so I’ll have to find the first one in this series in a shop (or as a Kindle sample) and have a read because it sounds intriguing but also like it has huge potential to be Too Grim.
And finally, more new fiction, more lovely covers, more books I hadn’t heard about mixed in with books that I have. I have now picked up The House With Nine Locks at least three times because of the gorgeous cover before reading the back and remembering that blurbs that include “a dangerous game of cat and mouse with fanatical and brutal detective” and the phrase “morally complex” are usually Not For Me. See also 33 Place Brugmann which has the word “devastating” in the blurb and is about occupied Brussels in World War 2. I have also picked up The Book of Gold more than once – but it is the first (and so far only published) book in a promised trilogy so that can wait!
Some quality wandering in Carlisle again for today’s post, mostly in Bookends and Bookcase. I’ve been up a couple of times since Christmas so this is a bit of a compendium of visits.And yes, I did buy stuff. Of course I did. Every time.
Firstly please note they’re advertising a book festival up this way next month.
Words by the Water has an interesting looking line up and Bookends is the official bookshop. If you’re anywhere near by, the website is here if you want to take a look.
And they’ve got a nice table of books featuring the authors inside now which is a change since January:
But then of course you want to swap out the Christmas stuff by now, and take a chance to do something a bit different because you can put Colleen Hoover, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Richard Osman and Emily Henry out at any time! And given that I think all of them have newbooks out this year, you probably will be!
There’s also some nice looking new releases as well. After seeing the same things on the new books shelves for ages, we’re starting to get a bit of variety. And I approve of that. Onwards towards March releases.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 