This was one of the books that I read on the way home from Cornwall last weekend: I finished “Unicorn” (reviewed yesterday, so I’m sort of catching up) and didn’t want to go for another Kindle book immediately, so had popped this one in my bag as a good read for a train journey. Of course, I then ended up trying not to laugh out loud on the train … oops.

More oops after the review. I appear to  have acquired even more books, and having put them on my TBR shelf, it’s all looking a bit perilous. I’d better get reading …

Jo Brand – “Born Lippy”

(29 September 2019, charity shop, Penzance)

Subtitled “How to do female”, this funny and useful book gives us a bit of memoir as well, which works well to protect Brand’s privacy (well, she lays a lot of stuff bare, but it’s not sold AS a memoir really) in addition to life advice aimed at, I think, teenagers and young women, covering family, relationships, drugs, health, friendship. There’s quite a lot on friendship, which is refreshing, including how not to behave to your friends when you get a partner, and how to keep friends.

She’s as no-nonsense and uncompromising as you’d hope and expect: for example, she has this to say in the clothes section:

My charming editor has suggested here that I talk about some of my favourite pieces of clothing. Hahahaha! I can barely remember the clothes I wore last week, so here are some weird clothes-related stories that stand out. (p. 41)

Also included are some great comebacks for when a sexist line is shouted at you, and good advice on work, family and relationship issues, all given in her exact voice: you can imagine her saying it all to you. A great travel read, too.

So as well as the journals I received in the week, I seem to have acquired even more books from shops and in the post!

On Wednesday I went into town to meet one of my lovely clients for a coffee, and when I arrived back on the high street, I realised my husband would be on his way to the dentist, so I stalked him and found him in The Works, where I spotted Simon Jenkins’ “Britain’s 100 Best Railway Stations” with lots of nice details and pictures, so he bought it for me from Bank of Matthew, which is a fund added to at Christmas and birthday and used to buy nice things. I did suggest he kept it back for Christmas but that apparently didn’t work.

Then later on I went out with my friend Sian to trawl the charity shops specifically for her to buy books from a couple of people’s wishlists to take to this weekend’s BookCrossing Unconvention. That’s for HER to buy BOOKs to GIVE AWAY. Second shop we went into and I was buying a CD shelf unit to use as a bookshelf and we were dragging it back to my house (at least the shop was on my road).

Then we spotted two books from Sian’s wishlist so I snapped them up for her Christmas present, some more Birmingham authors’ books which I will use for the Librarything Virago Not So Secret Santa (and two of these I managed to buy with two full Oxfam Books stampy cards, one of which Sian gave to me originally … it does get complicated!).

I found a book I’d been keeping an eye out for a while, “The Nakano Thrift Shop” by Hiromi Kawakami, so bought that for myself. And a lovely pristine copy of Paul Magrs’ “Exchange”, which I will be using for a giveaway next year (hint, hint).

And then we went back to The Works in case one of the books for Sian’s friends could be found in there – it could! hooray! – and I found Annie Darling’s “A Winter Kiss”, which is Book 4 in her Rochester Mews series (I’ve read “The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts” and “True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop” (the latter from NetGalley) and I have now ordered “Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop” which had been sitting in my “Saved for later” bit of my Amazon basket for a while, so I get the order right (of course!).

Then, I came home from a walk on Friday and discovered two parcels almost stopping me from opening the front door. I won Phillipa Ashley‘s “A Perfect Cornish Christmas” on NetGalley the other day and guessed it might be part of another trilogy (you will recall I read her “Cornish Cafe” series on holiday) and bought “A Perfect Cornish Summer” second-hand (annoyingly I’ve also spotted it new in The Works since) so I got the order right (of course).

Then I’d somewhat complicatedly paid the author direct and had a copy sent that was left over from the Iris Murdoch Society conference for Christopher Boddington’s “Iris Murdoch’s People A-Z” and there it was! It’s a substantial volume and far more rich and detailed than I’d expected – not just a concordance of names appearing in the novels, it goes right into places, real and fictional, books fictional characters have written, books they mention … how marvellous! I will use it for looking-up purposes but will probably actually want to read through it, perhaps in December at the end of my Iris Murdoch Readalong project.

And THEN (oh, it’s some kind of disease, isn’t it), I was shopping for a good friend’s birthday gifts and I spotted Simon Barnes’ “Rewild Yourself” which is about getting back in touch with nature. It was on a very special offer, and although I’ve not yet read his book on returning a bit of Norfolk to its natural state, as I only bought that on holiday (see top image), it felt like the right thing to do to buy it. So I did.

As I said, the TBR shelf is now really at over-capacity. I just have to finish “The Message to the Planet” (which is proving more enjoyable than I’d expected, as my less-favourite Iris Murdoch) and read and review a lovely book on photography and I’ll have to get a good move on. Fat books or thinner quick wins: which will it be?