Took a few days off in May 2003 to go to Hay-on-Wye, a famous ‘book’ town (though living in a city I’d say more ‘hamlet’) Perhaps inevitably, my home city seems to have collapsed to WHSmith or Waterstones. Great if you want the latest Harry Potter or Jackie Collins, but duff for any thing interesting and then expensive to boot. It was really refreshing to wander around so many books and browse.
With books at about £2-£3, it did become a bit of a ‘One goes mad in Hay’ as the list shows. Easy drive down Saturday, very nice B&B right in Hay with a full-on cooked breakfast. Hmm. Attempted to compensate by a cycle ride, which was great when it stopped drizzling. Also attempted a drive/walk into the black mountains on the way home. The map looked like it had a road well into the area and forest walks from there - but the roads got narrower and muddier so I gave up on that idea. Next time bring a 4x4!!
Big list of books
- Art
- Discovering Turner, Tate Gallery
- Impressionism, Phoebe Pool
- Dali, Dawn Ades,
- Impressionism, Bernard Denvir,
-
Monet, Jon House
- SciFi
- Darwinia:a novel of a very different 20th century, Robert Charles Wilson
- Planet of Exile, Ursula Le Guin
- Spacehounds of IPC, E.E.’Doc’ Smith
- the best of 1939-1952, Isaac Asimov
- The stainless steel rat, Harry Harrison
- Webcrash, Stephen Baxter
-
The immortals, James Gunn
- Science
- The human brain:a guided tour, Susan Greenfield
-
The birth of time:how the age of the universe was measured, John Gribbin
- Fiction
- Diamonds are forever, Ian Flemming
- Live and let die, Ian Flemming
- Brave new world, Aldous Huxley
- Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
- The war in the air, HG Wells
- Kipps, HG Wells
- Animal Farm, York notes study guide
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn
- Dracula, Bram Stoker
- The midwich cuckoos, John Wyndham
- Macbeth, William Shakespeare
- Oliver twist, Charles Dickens
- Holiday romance:and other writings for children, Charles Dickens
- The odyssey, Homer (Simpson?)
-
More ripping yarns, Michael Palin & Terry Jones
- History
- And we shall shock them:the british army in WW2, David Fraser
- The art of war:Waterloo to Mons, William McElwee
- A history of rome, Cary & Scullard
- Thoughts on war, BH Liddell Hart
-
Longitude, Dava Sobel
- Other
- The Amateur Potter, Ron Warring
- The mind of the strategist: business planning, Kenichi Ohmae
- The game of chess, H. Golombek
- Master of middle earth: the achievement of Tolkien, Paul Kocher
- pocket French-English dictionary