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So Cramlington book club has now joined twitter @crambookclub and upon joining I noticed something trending under the hashtag ‘bookadayuk’ interesting I thought what’s that? It turns out it’s this;

https://www.boroughpress.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BOOKADAY_June.pdf

And for those who can’t be bothered to click on the link (or just wanted to keep on reading this exciting post), for every day in June there is a different category of book. You then tweet your favourite of that particular category every day. Ever had a burning desire to know which book with a blue cover is the most popular? Can’t get to sleep at night without telling the world your favourite fictional father? Well panic no more #bookadayuk remedies that.

Todays category (11th June) is secondhand bookshop gem. Living up in Northumberland we are obviously honoured to have Barter Books on our doorstep – a very large secondhand bookshop in a converted railway station in Alnwick however my favourite bookshop has to be in Scarborough. It’s been a few years since I’ve last been to Scarborough and I can’t remember the name of the shop but it’s the one round the corner from Boyes that is like a tardis and has books stacked floor to ceiling (please don’t tell me it’s closed).

Anyway I used to go to Scarborough every year when I was younger and this was where I would head to (along with the 2 pence machines to which I was addicted!) It was here I would scour out the very few Maeve Binchy books I hadn’t already read, the John Grisham ones that I was fast becoming addicted to and the slightly risqué Shirley Conran and Jackie Collins ones.

My husband also most Christmas’s buys me a box of books. There are all randomly picked from charity shops and have featured over the years books such as The Giles Wareing Haters Club by Tim Dowling, Empress Orchid by Anchee Min and Angelas Ashes by Frank McCourt (the one I am presently reading having wanted to do so for ages).

Every Christmas I in turn buy every member of the book club a randomly chosen book from a charity shop. It acts like a secret Santa, everyone picks a wrapped book out of the box and it’s the luck of the drawer as to whether have already read it, hate it on sight or discover a whole new author. I wouldn’t be able to afford to do this at somewhere like Waterstones (I love that shop and am not knocking it in the slightest but I would literally have to take out a bank loan to buy the 13 books I need)

I think writing this has made me actually stop and think how long ago it was before I last trawled a second hand bookshop. It’s so easy for me to head to Amazon and buy a book for a couple of quid now that it’s very rare I even enter a bookshop let alone simply browse for the pure joy of it. This is something I will seek to rectify!

You will note I deliberately have spoken about gems of bookshops rather than a gem book from a bookshop as day 28 of the #bookadayuk slightly overlaps on this point and I want to leave myself something to talk about!

Tomorrows book is ‘I pretend to have read it’

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