Tag: books in the wild

There’s a new romance bookshop in London, so of course I have been to visit!

Saucy Books is in Notting Hill, just a short walk from Westbourne Grove Tube station, and as you can see it has a lovely purple frontage and tropical look which makes it really stand out from the crowd.

The tropical colour palate continues inside the store, where there’s what I suspect is a carefully curated selection of romance books, which to my eye seemed to have a little bit of something for most romance readers.

As it happens, I have read quite a lot of this display- Nora Goes off Script, The Paradise Problem, Finders Keepers, The Roommate, and The Neigbor Favor were all books of the week and I’ve writen about One to Watch too.

There’s also “The Smut Hut” upstairs – where there’s a lot of sports romance, but also the romantasy section. I’m not a big romantasy reader, but more sports romances are on my to-do list – except I find it hard to spot the ones that don’t have alphahole heros, because that is really not my thing!

It was actually pretty busy in the store when I arrived – not that you can tell from the photos! – so hopefully it’s going to do OK. I think the location is a good one – I went down to Notting Hill and Portobello Market after I’d made my purchases (yes there were purchases!) and it’s so popular with tourists that hopefully this could become a spot for them.

Have a great weekend!

Happy Saturday everyone. I’ve been wandering the bookshops again, and so this week we’ve got my latest spots in Gower Street.

Firstly, lets have a moment for the Penguin book vending machine. I’m not sure how long it’s there for, but it’s so cool and I hope there are more of them on tour soon.

Secondly I’m always interested to see what in-store book clubs are reading. And Gower Street is super busy when to comes to events – when i was in there there were people galloping through the store performing Shakespeare, with an audience trailing behind. I read a lot of Nina Bawden as a child but I haven’t read much of her adult fiction and I have Sangu Mandanna’s previous book on the Kindle waiting to be read – this has given me a nudge to move that up the list a bit.

Another thing giving me a nudge – the display of Atmosphere. My copy is sitting on the pile at home too – but it’s the special edition version with the pretty edges.

Here’s A Case of Life and Limb in the wild – go read the bonus review, and my review of the first one – I’m hoping we get a third. And also on the hardback crime shelf is the book that goes with Bookish, the new TV show created by and starring Mark Gatiss, although he hasn’t written this novelisation…

And finally, I was hunting in the American history section for the Caroline Bessette-Kennedy book that I keep seeing being written about (often in the context of having the wrong photos in it!) and not findng it, but instead realising that Ask Not is now out in paperback and I still haven’t read the hardback, and then buying another book about the Kennedy wives despite that…

Have a great weekend everyone!

Here we are again, back in The Works where the main thing I’m seeing is the evolution of publishing trends again..4

Lets take the trending titles. We’ve got a bit of the traditional big names like Richard Osman, Lee Child and Sally Rooney and also Butter, but a lot of this are the TikTok trending books – and at the moment that seems to be romantasy, sports romances, and cozy small town romance. The decline of historical romance as a genre can be seen here in that five years ago because where actually are they?!

And not just in the trending -here’s the romance section, where five years ago I would have been picking up my Mary Balogh, Stephanie Laurens, Eloisa James and Julia Quinn books and as far as i can work out the oldest setting here are the sagas and the Anton Du Beke – which means interwar to World War Two.

And it’s the same here – mid century at oldest, lots of sports romances (which are mainly by new-to-me-authors) and then a lot of books by people like Lucy Score who have emerged from the big-in-self-publishing-and-transitioned-to-trad-publishing world.

And then the other thing that I’m noticing is that there are a lot fewer murder mysteries on the shelves – I used to get a lot of the historical mysteries from The Works as well as trying new contemporary murder mysteries out – but this time we’ve got about one carcase of mysteries and thrillers if you add them together really and a lot less of them are in my reading wheelhouse.

So the good news is that I didn’t buy anything to add to the pile. The bad news is that I came out a bit worried about my prospects for finding books I like in the shops at hte moment. And then I got home and was reminded of the size of the pile and all the things I have waiting to be read and told myself I was being ridiculous!

Have a great weekend!

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.

Have a great weekend everyone.

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.

And on this side my hit rate is even higher: I’ve read Knife Skills for Beginners (and its sequel, A Fatal Crossing, the Grantchester, the Andrew Cartmel (which is one of the non Vinyl Detective ones), Death and Croissants, The Marlow Murder Club, the Richard Coles and the Agatha Raisin.

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.

Have a great Saturday everyone.

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…

Have a great weekend everyone!