After a lot (2 hours) of deliberation, I finally settled on the following 7 books. The bottom row are books I'll be taking on the overnight ferry with me, as the chances of me sleeping are exceptionally slim.
From top to bottom, left to right, the books are as follows:
- Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales
- The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber
- Magpies, Squirrels & Thieves; How the Victorians Collected the World - Jacqueline Yallop
- 1984 - George Orwell
- The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
- The Sherlock Holmes School of Self-Defense; The Manly Art of Bartitsu as used against Professor Moriarty - E.W. Barton-Wright
- A Journey of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe
I know that to some of you this may seem like a lot of books to take for a ten day holiday, but in my mind certain books are for certain things.
The 'reading' books are The Book Thief, which I've already started, and The Book of Air and Shadows which I picked up from the Oxfam bookstore in Belper the other day. These are the books which I (hopefully) just fall into and don't come out of until I've finished. I'm always exceptionally picky over this kind of book.
The 'I'm doing A level Literature, I need to read sensible books' books are A Journal of the Plague Year and 1984. I picked the Daniel Defoe up from the Oxfam store as well.
Then I have the 'maybe slightly boring or not particularly gripping' books which are the Sherlock Holmes School of Self-Defense book and Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves. I normally read a few pages from books like this before I go to bed at night. As you can see, I'm about halfway through the Sherlock book already, I found it in a charity shop and it's actually kind of interesting.
The last book doesn't really fit into a section as I was bought it as a present after I fell in love with the illustrations in a bookstore. Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales is an absolutely beautiful book, and I can't wait to finally get the time to see what the actual stories are like. (You see my background on this blog? It's a photo I took of the little cafe in Scarthin Books which is the bookstore where I saw this book.)
The books which I wanted to take but couldn't quite justify are The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Keep Calm and Carry On which is a really cute book of quotations. I may or may not be quietly planning a way of sneaking them in without my brain noticing.
