Reading as a cheap hobby

maddiemay

Wonderful thread, I too have been a voracious reader since a small child,  Loving being reminded about so many books/authors that I have enjoyed (at a cost to the tidiness of my home and the complexity of meals produced).

I have just started the last of the Stephen Booth Cooper/Fry series, like previous poster sad there are no more to read.  Loved the Gamache series and have started to collect them to keep - after having previously bought many of them and re-donated, same applies to L J Ross and Marie Hannah Northumberland, Robert Galbraith Strike, CJ Sansom and SJ Parris crime series, Wolf Hall etc.  Need to do a lot of pruning to make space for these.  OH and I have a lot of books, predominantly for areas in the UK we love to visit, also our own interests of cycling, cooking, health, and of course new authors yet to find.

I love dipping in here every day to see all the great posts

Wednesday2000

I saw yesterday that the book Eat, Shop, Save by Dale Pinnock is only 99p on kindle. I did buy it to see if there were any good tips. I will read that today as it is a horrible and rainy day here!

annieb64

I love the Gamache series too and also the Kate Shugak novels by Dana Stabenow- they are set in Alaska.

We used to live in the Peak District so enjoyed Stephen Booth's novels and could recognise many of the places he mentioned. He came to our WI group meeting once and was very interesting.

machasraven

-taff said:

I didn't understand much of a marxist winnie the pooh though.....two books that stick in my memory of the childrens library were one about a journey a young boy? makes through the representations of the zodiac, I do remember the scorpion stinging him on the head to send hm back to his world, and another which scared the pants off me, there was a demon or something in it called The Shadrach but blowed if I can find what it was, this would have been late seventies...

The book was called Ludo and the the Star horse and I still have it.

Savvy_Sue

PipneyJane said:

@Savvy_Sue don’t leave us in suspense!  What was the first book the library lent out?

Sadly I can't remember exactly, I've only glimpsed part of the display so far. But I think it was something about one of the polar expeditions which must have been quite recent at the time! 

Savvy_Sue

MrsStepford said:

I was spluttering coffee at your remark @Savvy_Sue 😯 The redeeming feature of Ladybird books, was the artwork. Oxfam Wallingford salvaged illustrations from damaged Ladybird books and mounted them. I snapped up eleven or twelve farming ones from the 1960s and put them in glass frames. They are positioned above our main stairs and I think they look pretty good.

Just to be clear, it was not Ladybird Books per se which traumatised me: there are some wonderful titles, and the illustrations excellent too. It was the combination of Peter and Jane's very circumscribed lives and those awful awful Janet and John books which nearly killed my love of reading before it started. 

And forgive me if it's already been mentioned (I am resisting reading the whole thread at once), but there is currently an exhibition in Bath until 14th April: 

The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists

I am reminding DH at regular intervals that we MUST go! 

DS2 taught himself to read from the cereal packets on the breakfast table. Lost in the fog of PND, older 'difficult' child and demanding baby, I hadn't even realised he was so desperate to learn. And of course he was quickly of the opinion that anything his older brother could read, he could read too. So he did. 

Did anyone else catch that snippet of the news last night of Vaughan Gething's appointment as First Minister of Wales being announced? His son, very sensibly, had a book with him, and his nose in it.  That lad will go far ... 

PipneyJane

Wednesday2000 said:

I saw yesterday that the book Eat, Shop, Save by Dale Pinnock is only 99p on kindle. I did buy it to see if there were any good tips. I will read that today as it is a horrible and rainy day here!

Was it any good?

I saw this photo of FB and thought of all of you.



- Pip

Wednesday2000

PipneyJane said:

Wednesday2000 said:

I saw yesterday that the book Eat, Shop, Save by Dale Pinnock is only 99p on kindle. I did buy it to see if there were any good tips. I will read that today as it is a horrible and rainy day here!

Was it any good?

It was quite good. I have decided to make curried parsnip soup as well as quesadillas next week now as they were two of the healthy, cheap recipes in his book and I have all the ingredients at home.

Brie

Just had an interesting conversation with one of my nieces who is currently working on a theatre project about Margaret Cavendish aka Mad Mag.  She was the author of The Blazing World the first sci fi book written by a woman, in 1666.  Apparently available in Penguin Classics but also (according to niece) somewhat impenetrable.  The theatre piece will be more concerned about her radical life for instance being the first woman allowed to attend the Royal Society, something that didn't happen again for a couple of centuries.   A biography of her, Pure Wit, is currently on the NYTimes best sellers list.

Meanwhile closer to home I've been talked out of taking on holiday 2 chunky hardbacks by Richard Osman and have instead gone for Stanley Tucci's book Taste.  The OH bought it for me last year as a Christmas present after we'd seen the programme Tucci did on Italian food but he then wandered off reading it and I never got a chance to read it myself!  

dp1

Just caught up with this thread...it's lovely to hear about everyone's favourite books. When my granddaughter started in Reception last September she knew all her letters and could read short words....I've always spent a lot of time reading to her and she loves books.  She was most put out when her first few 'reading books' had no words only pictures! The next ones had just one word on each page so I let her try reading her own books and helped her with the longer words.  Now she's usually given 3 books at a time, both fiction and non fiction, which she has to read 5 times to get her reading point for that week. Annoyingly, any other, usually much harder, books she read at home don't count as they're not her reading book - which seems daft to me. I encourage her to read as much as she wants to when she's here with me.
Can't remember who mentioned The Day of the Triffids - I read that at school and was terrified.
I have 3 bookcases in my bedroom and then little one has one downstairs for all her books. I always have a pile I haven't read yet and lots on my kindle 'just in case.'