Left to our own devices, we’re all perfectly happy at being happy.
It’s Saturday morning and the bookshop is busy – the showers and chill in the air have done little to dent the enthusiasm of a trip into town. The hustle and bustle, the noise of chatter and laughter, friends bumping into one another, conversations with customers firing off in all directions like fireworks of curiosity, excited children bouncing around like party balloons. I’ve often tried to distil what it is about our bookshop which brings people together – perhaps it’s a magnet made of joy?
And like all Saturdays we have a quick look through the book reviews in the weekend papers – what’s new, what’s grabbing the headlines and what’s missing which we expected to find – but perhaps only we knew! All bookshops are different and what’s popular in Bolton may not be in Bicester, and vice-versa, but we’re curious creatures at Coles and like to know what’s going on the other side of the hedge. But whilst browsing those papers you can’t help but see there is so much sadness in that newsprint – the joy which fills our bookshop on a Saturday is not leaping off the pages of the popular press – in fact it’s mostly the opposite. Left to our own devices, we’re all perfectly happy at being happy. Like germinating seeds coming up out of the ground, the good stuff grows upwards towards the sunny uplands and finally blossoms, it’s only the rubbish which rains down on us from above. Today is the first day of Independent Bookshop Week – seek out a bookshop and be drawn towards the joy and away from the rain.
We’ll be taking the pop-up Coles to Hampton Court Palace tomorrow for ‘The Rest is History – Live’ with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. If you’re there, pop by and say hello – we’re conveniently located next to the Bar!
Great Things by Thomas Hardy
Sweet cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
Spinning down to Weymouth town
By Ridgway thirstily,
And maid and mistress summoning
Who tend the hostelry:
O cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me!
The dance it is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
With candles lit and partners fit
For night-long revelry;
And going home when day-dawning
Peeps pale upon the lea:
O dancing is a great thing,
A great thing to me!
Love is, yea, a great thing,
A great thing to me,
When, having drawn across the lawn
In darkness silently,
A figure flits like one a-wing
Out from the nearest tree:
O love is, yes, a great thing,
A great thing to me!
Will these be always great things,
Great things to me? …
Let it befall that One will call,
“Soul, I have need of thee”:
What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,
Love, and its ecstasy,
Will always have been great things,
Great things to me!
One of our picks of the week is the excellent Michael Pedersen with The Cat Prince & Other Poems. Equal parts tender and trenchant, raw and ribald, plangent and smutty, these poems exhibit an emotionally charged, fantastical playground of language and lore. Our other top pick of the week goes to Rukmini Iyer and her The Green Cookbook. I’ve been using Iyer’s The Green Roasting Tin for years, and there’s not a single recipe in it that disappoints; so you can understand my delight when I learned that Rukmini has indulged us with a new collection of green eats! I’m certain my copy of this will get years of good use, and rightly so.
Other excellent fiction this week includes, Loving With Demons by Hana Mahmood, this is an emotional, seductive and completely unputdownable page-turner; a story about dark desires, deadly obsession and the dangerous line between love and hatred. The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami is a time-bending tale of love: Riko spends each night travelling back in time, from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century, and in doing so, she learns more about herself as a 21st Century woman. Angie Spoto’s The Grief Nurse tells the story of Lynx, a nurse who is employed by the wealthy Aster family to take away their grief and negative emotions; this is a spellbinding Gothic novel, dripping with dark allure and mystery. And for fans of sci-fi, we have Rebecca Fraimow’s Lady Eve’s Last Con: Ruth and her sister Jules have been small-time hustlers on interstellar cruises for as long as they can remember, but one day things turn sour when Jules falls in love with one of her targets.
New in non-fiction, It’s Not Banter, It’s Racism is Azeem Rafiq’s personal account of the racism prevalent in cricket; this book gives a voice to the otherwise undocumented prejudices within sports. Rinsed by Geoff White is an expose into money laundering – it explains how the tech industry knowingly washes money from the world’s deadliest crooks. Jewel Box by Tim Blackburn is the most beautiful paperback I’ve seen in a long time, this book offers an insight into the widely ignored moth. Whilst, You Must Be Psychic by Chris Riley teaches you how to grow your psychic abilities using practice and intuition – because, who wouldn’t want to be psychic!
And for very small children Marion Billet brings us Poppy the Pigeon’s London Home: in this lovely rhyming book we get to explore London throughout all the seasons as Poppy finds the perfect place to build her nest. We also have Baby, Where Are You? a lift-the-flap book that you can personalise for a new baby. This is a very special memento that you can keep forever!
As always, if there’s something you need help with, or a book you need ordering, please call or email us!
From Amber
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The full newsletter with links to books – including this week’s Signed Editions – can be found HERE
