Continuing to fall off the wagon...

I have my usual charity shops that I like to pop in to with a nice turnaround of stock and I tend to prefer the shops who organise their books well into sections. I should visit the less usual shops more often (or maybe I shouldn't?) as I have discovered that my local Cancer Research UK has all books for £1, and on asking if this was a special offer at the till, this is the normal price of a book. I feel I have may have overpaid elsewhere on a number of occasions but my as my thoughts always conclude, the money is for charity and this can only be a good thing.

So last Thursday I discovered Cancer Research UK (which incidentally have a weak A-Z system of shelving, with a large part of the bottom shelf being obscured by clothes) and I was impelled to buy 5 books, one of which was a gift so I shall only list the 4.

14. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - £1 Cancer Research UK
15. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - £1 Cancer Research UK
16. Geisha - Liza Dalby - £1 Cancer Research UK
17. The Fobidden City: The Great Within - May Holdswoth & Caroline Courtauld - £1 Cancer Research UK

I hadn't heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn but the Penguin modern classics cover caught my eye and the back cover interested me "the brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared". I see now that Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature and I am certain that for £1 this is an absolute bargain. It would only be better if the cover was more retro looking but then again I might not have picked it up.

I've not read Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and I hated the film (mainly because just like I find it hard to watch Liam Neeson or Gerard Butler playing Americans, it's hard to watch Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang playing Japanese) but I am interested in Japanese culture and bought Geisha by Liza Dalby. A non-fiction book, Dalby is an authority in geisha and was a consultant to Arthur Golden in writing the book and producing the film. The back cover claims that she was the only foreigner ever to become a geisha but with a quick internet search I am not sure this is the case. It looks like Dalby attended events and researched into geisha lives but did not formally debut as a geisha but Fiona Graham apparently did. Although I am not giving any extra kudos to Graham, I just think the cover seems misleading at first look. I shall have to read it!

And... on Friday I returned to the same shop and found I must buy:

18. The Accidental Theorist - Paul Krugman - £1 Cancer Research UK
19. Boy - Ronald Dahl - £1 Cancer Research UK
20. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - £1 Cancer Research UK

Whilst my reading rate is nowhere near my shopping rate I thought it might be good to log what I actually read as well. Currently I am on p170 of The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p180 of Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and have about 5 China related books that I am partially way through that I won't bother to list.

In the last fortnight I have finished reading a wonderful 1986 edition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (99p Oxfam) and a 1981 Penguin Modern Classics print of Hiroshima by John Hersey (£1.50 British Heart Foundation) which I read whilst listening to All Farewells are Sudden by A winged Victory for the Sullen for an absolutely haunting experience.

I didn't buy any books over the actual weekend as I was in Bruges and although I did try and look at bookshops, the books on sale were in Flemish. My recent books however should tide me over for a while, they're piled into a tower on my desk and I'll be sorting them this afternoon.