Charity Shop Watch: April 2009

I'd not been on my charity shop run for quite some time, but came back with quite a haul today. I did my bit for heart disease, spending £10 on four books in the British Heart Foundation Shop. The most expensive of the charity shops on my run, they seem to have upped their prices since my last trip, with many books now on sale for £3 a go. But they do have a good selection and the four I bought could easily have been doubled.

I bought:

The Book of Chameleons by Jose Eduardo Agualusa
You Cannont Live as I have Lived and Not End up Like This - The Thoroughly DisgracefullLife and Times of Willie Donaldson by Terence Blacker
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Girls by Lori Lansens

Once more proving that last year's best seller is this year's charity fodder, there were four copies of No Time for Goodbyes in the BHF shop and another one in the YMCA shop. How long before multiple copies of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher start to appear there?

Holiday Reads

I love browsing other people's bookshelves, so I was delighted to find that the apartment we had rented in San Francisco had a small library of books.

It was an eclectic selection, I presume comprising of books belonging to the owners and things left behind by previous holiday-makers.

It included the quintessential San Francisco book "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin which I'd been meaning to read so was pleased to discover here. I also read "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell, the poverty and misery providing a nice contrast with Californian sun. I started "A Short History of Nearly Everything " by Bill Bryson but it wasn't short enough and I abondoned it when I realised that I wouldn't be able to read 600 pages in the remaining time.

The collection had something for all tastes:

White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Virago Woman's Guide to San Francisco
Treasury of Poetry
Its Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulk
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Complete Book of Horse Care
3 books by Anne Rice
Several Alexander McCall Smith books
Multiple books by Nick Bantock (who?)

and my absolute favourite "There and Back Again" by Sean Astin, which I did try to read aloud from once, but found so dull I couldn't continue.