Voltaire & Rousseau – a bookshop

14 July 2010 23:58

We had a lovely day out in the west end of Glasgow yesterday. Even the weather was perfect, sunny and about 65 F/18C.

The west end is always a nostalgia trip for us as my husband was a student at Glasgow Uni for 7 years with me as the breadwinner for the last 3 of them.

But nowadays it means books, and as we hadn’t been to Voltaire & Rousseau for years we thought it was time we paid a visit. It isn’t the easiest place to get to and you really have to know that it is there as it is situated in Otago Lane, which is off Otago Street, about a 10 minute walk from Great Western Road.

As you can see it is a mixture of heaven and hell for book lovers. There are thousands of used/second-hand books and although they are divided into sections, the stock spills all over the place, making it quite difficult to navigate your way around them all. The proprietor doesn’t mind you taking photographs either.

I found it really frustrating that I couldn’t reach any of the lovely old leather bound classics, the books piled in front of those shelves blocked them all off. It’s amazing though because I do usually find something that I’ve been looking for there and I’m obviously not the only one as a young lad waved a book in front of my face excitedly telling me that he had found what he was looking for – a miracle he thought. It was Around the World in Eighty Days.

So if you are in Glasgow and you are into books take a stroll down Otago Lane and the nearby Thistle Books which is in Otago Street and is very different as everything is neat and organised, which is all very professional and as it should be, but somehow not as exciting an experience as Voltaire and Rousseau.

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Categories: Books

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The Edinburgh International Book Festival

13 July 2010 09:51

I’ve been looking at the Edinburgh Book Festival site and wondering if there is anything worth going to see. There are certainly loads of authors visiting it, unfortunately I haven’t heard of most of them.

This is completely my fault I’m sure because I do tend to concentrate on books written by people who are very dead, so it would be a sensation if any of them did turn up in Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is about 40 minutes from us by car and we did go last year because my husband wanted to go to a S.F. reading, but I just mooched around in the bookshop and ended up using a book voucher which I had been given for my birthday.

Of all the writers attending, I’ve only read:

Christopher Brookmyre
Joyce Carol Oates
Louis de Bernières
Fay Weldon

Am I being madly blasé about this whole thing just because it is on my doorstep? I know that some people will be travelling from very far afield to visit it. I just don’t seem to be able to get excited about it.

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Categories: Books

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Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

12 July 2010 10:17

I had really been looking forward to this show but I don’t know what happened. I completely missed it on TV. I think it was on too early for me as I tend not to watch anything in the early evening during summer.

Anyway, luckily you can watch it on the internet nowadays so I’ve been trying to catch up with it.

Take a look here, if you are interested in gardens and plants.

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Categories: BBC, Gardening, Television

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St Andrews – Golf and Books

11 July 2010 13:47

We had a day out in St Andrews last Tuesday and as you can see the preparations for the British Open, which starts later this week are well underway.

The lawn shavers were out in force but I honestly couldn’t see any grass being trimmed off at all. Amazingly, members of the public were just wandering around the fairways, or should I say the hallowed ground. Previously I had thought that someone might have taken a pot-shot at you if you did that. Mind you, I find it very difficult to walk on grass when it is that well tended green velvet sort so I kept to the path.

This photo is from nearly the same place as the one in a previous post, showing the difference.

We had a nice lunch at The Central pub after we had been around the book shops. At first I thought it was going to be slim pickings but I ended up getting quite a book haul.

1. Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham
2. The Harsh Voice by Rebecca West
3. The King’s General by Daphne du Maurier
4. The Man Who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
6. The Mystery Mile, The Crime at Black Dudley and Look to the Lady – a Margery Allingham omnibus.

I’m fairly sure that I read the du Maurier one in the year dot but possibly not, so I want to read it to complete her works.

Coincidentally I read in The Guardian on Thursday that their columnist Deborah Orr had just finished reading the Chesterton book and had really enjoyed it.

I’m probably the last person in the reading world to get around to The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society Book but as it is set during the German occupation there, I think I’ll be reading this one soon.

I don’t want to know how many books I have in my TBR queue now, but it isn’t anything like 600 – I hope!

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Categories: Books, Towns

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School Holidays

10 July 2010 10:00

It’s hard to believe it, but the first week of the school holidays has disappeared already. My husband is just beginning to relax now, still there are five more weeks to enjoy and hopefully we will be able to get away for a bit of a road trip in the next week or so.

Today we managed to get to Edinburgh although we stayed away from the centre of town and just toured the bookshops of the Stockbridge area. I was actually looking for a copy of Oblomov by Goncharov, but no luck. So now that I’ve tried all of the local shops, including St Andrews, I’m going to buy it from the internet.

As you can imagine, it’s rare for me to get out of a bookshop without buying something, so in the next few days I’ll be blogging about my new/old book loot.

I thought my book pile was bad but I’m sure that I read in a book blog the other night that someone had over 600 books in their TBR pile! I can’t remember who it was (it’s my age). Surely that must be the biggest pile yet, or is anyone owning up to even more!

My reading rate has slowed down such a lot too. That’s what happens when your husband is at home all day.

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Invisible by Paul Auster

10 July 2010 00:49

At 308 pages and nice clear print this was a quick read which I did enjoy, although not quite as much as The Brooklyn Follies which is the only other Paul Auster book which I have read.

The book is in four parts and the story begins in 1967 in New York city where Adam Walker, a young undergraduate and would be poet, meets Rudolph Born and his girlfriend Margot at a party.

Adam becomes entangled in their lives and witnesses a horrible crime which haunts him and changes his future completely.

There are three different narrators moving the story on to Paris and an island in the Caribbean with the story ending in 2007, and along the way there is the ultimate taboo subject of incest involved: well maybe.

It isn’t what you would call comfort reading, but it wasn’t supposed to be I’m sure.

When my mother-in-law was alive, I used to read books before giving them to her because she was easily shocked. This one would have had her screaming for valium!

On a personal note I was pleased to see Hedy Lamarr getting a passing mention in the book. I’ve always been a fan of vintage films and she was my favourite actress when I was a wee girl. She was also very different from other actresses as she had a career as a scientist too.

I’ll definitely be reading more of Paul Auster’s books.

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Pasta with Chorizo and Tomato

8 July 2010 23:34

This is the meal which I cooked for dinner last Wednesday night, it was very tasty, although not a terribly sensible choice given the fact that the weather was very warm here that day. It would be a perfect winter warmer I think. It should serve 4.

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, sliced
250g / 8oz chorizo sausage, sliced
425g / 14oz tin chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 – 1 teaspoon chopped chilli
12 oz pasta
garnish with chopped herbs and cheese

Fry the onion in the olive oil until tender
Add the sausage to the fried onion and stir together, cook for 2-3 minutes. Add the tinned tomatoes, wine and chilli and season with salt and pepper.
Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Meanwhile cook the pasta until al dente. Drain it and return it to the pan. Add the sauce to the pasta and stir well.
Serve and sprinkle the top with herbs and cheese.

This is the original recipe but as ever I changed it a bit. I had some chilli cheese which needed to be used up. I think it was just a sort of cheddar cheese which had a lot of chopped chilli added into it.

Frankly it was so fiery it left me gasping but I hate food to be wasted so decided that I could use it up in this pasta dish, obviously substituting the chilli cheese for the chopped chilli which the recipe called for.

I think I added about 6oz of the chilli cheese.

It probably seems a bit strange but our ‘boys’ have always been big pasta fans and they have always wanted a mixture of different pasta shapes in the same meal.

Don’t ask me why, I’ve never been able to understand it because to me pasta is pasta and it tastes the same no matter what shape it is.

I didn’t want to open some good wine just to cook with, so for the first time in about a hundred years I bought a box of wine just for cooking. I had been assured that boxes of wine have improved greatly over the years. Sadly the wine turned out to be very dry indeed, in fact it is what we in Scotland would describe as wersh.

The chilli flavour was so overpowering in my version of this recipe that we couldn’t detect any wine flavour at all, but it was still a very nice meal.

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Categories: Recipes

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To Kill a Mockingbird at 50

8 July 2010 00:23

I enjoyed watching the BBC documentary To Kill a Mockingbird at 50. I watched it last night and it will be available to watch on the iplayer for another 12 days. The film is 60 minutes long.

Andrew Smith had been hoping to get an interview with Nelle Harper Lee but of course she didn’t oblige him, although her presence did seem to be felt by him as he travelled around Monroeville. She did allow her sister Alice to speak to him and friends and neighbours contributed to the film too.

I found it interesting anyway and hope you like it too.

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Categories: BBC, Books

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The Gathering Night by Margaret Elphinstone

7 July 2010 00:30

Yet again I have to thank Judith of Reader in the Wilderness for her research, she was looking for Scottish authors and came up with Margaret Elphinstone.

The Gathering Night is set in Mesolithic Scotland and although there isn’t much evidence left of the people, Margaret Elphinstone has managed to weave an entertaining story from what is known of the lives of the hunter-gatherers.

The only definite historic fact is that a tsunami struck the east coast of Scotland around about 6150 BC and she has used this for the storyline.

I’ve been imagining the landscape described in it as I was reading, trying to work out which lochs might have featured in the story. I had decided that the Twin Daughter peaks were probably based on the East and West Lomonds in Fife as they are the only hills like that which I know of. In her afterword the author thanked a lady in Scotlandwell for explaining to her how wild honey was harvested. Scotlandwell is not far from the Lomonds, so that sealed it for me.

As so little is known of the people then, this book is inevitably a type of fantasy writing, but I think that as human beings really don’t ever seem to change much then the whole story is very believable.

I especially liked the reincarnation belief system which Elphinstone gave them and the behaviour of the people after a new baby was born. Obviously it was taken from the way we react nowadays. The baby had to be recognised as someone from the past by someone else in the family, other than the mother.

Of course that is exactly what would have happened. I’m sure we’ve all had experience of the older members of our families leaning over the new baby and claiming that the wee soul is the double of uncle Jimmy or whomever.

Anyway, I’m wandering again. I did enjoy reading this book and I’ll certainly read more of her work in the future.

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Categories: Books

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Scottish words – drookit

4 July 2010 23:49

Drookit is what we were today. We visited my sister and it started to rain during the drive back home. It was absolutely torrential, just about the heaviest rain that I have ever seen. It was very windy too so I think we must have been getting the tail end of a hurricane, which happens quite often in this area.

In the 5 second dash from the car into the house we were absolutely soaked, drowned, or as we say in Scotland – drookit.

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Categories: Scottish words

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