One of the many bonuses of visiting my family near Cambridge is that sometimes I manage to pick the same weekend that Galloway and Porter have one of their Warehouse clearance sales.

Every so often, they open up their general warehouse to the public to clear excess stock, normally for £1 a book. There is all sorts on offer, often quite a large selection of children’s books, but otherwise there’s everything from the Canterbury Tales to the X-men, travel books, maps, reference books, academic books and a few items that make you wonder who’s idea it was to actually print that. With it being a mixture of hard and softbacks, I limit myself to buying what I can physically carry, so today I got away fairly lightly with just the 17 books. They’ll show up on my librarything when I get a bored few minutes to scan them in.

Unlike my groaning shelves, I find these book sales to be quite relaxing and fun to explore. They’re well attended so there’s enough of a crowd to vanish into, you can just browse along the tables and have the freedom to dip into books that you normally wouldn’t consider reading the back of. Not that I would advocate buying anything terribly embarrassing of course, I did go with my family after all, but with each item you pick up costing a pound, you don’t have to worry about wasting too much money on something you’re unlikely to read.

Now I just need to finish getting the reading-a-lot-of-book-spines crick out of my neck..

“Nation”, the latest novel from the ever popular Terry Pratchett shows that he’s still able to write great stories, packed with the humour, intelligence we all love, stuck together with just enough reality to make it all work.

This book is a departure from the famous Discworld setting, but as Terry himself said, “I cannot write the next Discworld book while this one is in my head.”

It’s clearly pitched at the Young Adult audience, playing on many childhood mysteries and fears that get the reader to really buy into the protagonists whilst still allowing the author to use some adult themes that keep it interesting to the rest of us.

The deadpan witticisms are all present and correct, as is the master novelist’s craft of describing just enough to convey their world and then letting the reader do the rest of the work. An appreciation of stereotypical colonial Britain helps smile at some of the scenes.

The story is essentially two teenagers rapid induction into adult life in the face of adversity whilst building up the world around them and fighting off the villains in the process. There is plenty of fun adventure to be had (the Beer Song springs to mind) but interspersed with moments of grim humour. I was glad many of the situations occurred to the characters and not to me, but they were brushed off in the way that children might.

One of my favourite scenes involved one of the lead characters inviting the other one to Afternoon Tea in a shipwreck and despite not speaking each other’s language, they still fret over not being able to find the napkin rings. I’m not sure about the culinary delight of dead-lobster flavoured scones.

The story quickly builds up its pace into a proper page turner. It isn’t as intense as his best work but I wasn’t tempted to pick up another book until I’d finished it.

As ever, highly recommended reading.

The search for Backwatersthwaite

I was recently introduced to a rather popular series of books by Gervase Phinn, and although I’m typically a few years later than the rest of the world, I’ve found reading them enjoyable enough to warrant a new category on the ol’ blog. So much so that it’s taken me 3 weeks to finish writing this post, it seems that reading the books is more fun than writing about them.

Of course one advantage of having waited so long, is that the author had a chance to write the first 5 books in theseries, and I do so like big series.

The Dales series of books is written as a collection of anonymised autobiographical anecedotes, with each book covering Phinn’s life as a Yorkshire county school inspector over an academic year. The written language is very accessible and quick to read (yes, even faster than I normally read), with the characters and their conversations really springing off the page with clever use of spelling and punctuation. The chapters are reasonably short, covering perhaps an incident or a scene or two, which really lends the books to casual reading, such as on a train or a lunch break. The punchlines are well delivered, totally deadpan and often unexpected, leading to all manner of involuntary outbursts, the grounding in reality just makes it funnier.

The fictional locations and characters major and minor recur throughout the books, and are memorable enough that you don’t spend too much time trying to match up the name to the character or place. It is clear that the author really took a shine to the landscape and the population of the Yorkshire Moors and Dales, he always takes care to describe scenes when he pauses to look out of the window at the view. Which is something that I can totally relate to, having spent most of my Sundays at university out walking in Yorkshire with the Outdoor Society. One downside is that I’ve found myself trolling the Ordnance Survey maps of the Dales and Moors trying to see if I can spot some of the locations alluded to in the books. After all, there can’t be many Yorkshire dales with roads going along both sides of the valley.

Some of the major plot elements that span the different books are often in the form of cliffhangers, which are easily spoilt by reading the back covers trying to work out which book is where in the series. To help avoid unnecessary disappointments, here are the books in order:

The Other Side of the Dale

Over Hill and Dale

Head Over Heels in the Dales

Up and Down in the Dales

The Heart of the Dales