My Favourite Bookshops

I love bookshops, they are my churches, and I can happily spend at hours at a time browsing every shelf, regardless of whether or not I have any intention of buying any books (spoiler alert: I always end up buying books anyway). This is a list of my top 3 favourite bookshops, just because:

1. The American Book Centre, Amsterdam

Photo from here

Ugh, be still my beating heart! This place is incredible, four beautiful floors of books, the selection is incredible and they have every genre of book you could possibly hope to find. The Netherlands doesn't have a whole lot of English language bookshops so every time I'm in Amsterdam I spend at least an hour in here (as documented in this post).

2. Waterstones, Birmingham

Photo from here

I love this bookshop. I've only been there a few times because I'm only ever in Birmingham to visit one of my lovely friends who used to live there, but every time I went to see him I would drag him in here and he would traipse around after me while I stroked all the books. The building itself is amazing (as you can see) and there's a bunch of sneaky little hidden rooms off to the side which I love to explore.

3. Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastricht

Photo from here

I had heard about this bookshop online and seen a lot of pictures of it, and I had my heart set on visiting it for a long time, but I only finally went last weekend - which you can read about here if you're so inclined. The place is obviously just incredible and it's really awe-inspiring just to wander around it. Unluckily for me there isn't a huge selection of English books, but the place itself totally makes up for it.

BONUS ROUND - A bookshop I want to visit:

1. Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Photo from here

Because duh. This one is definitely on my bucket list, just look at it. I've never been to Paris before but as soon as I do this will definitely be my first stop. Wait actually no, that's a lie because I'll be in Paris for the first time in my life at the end of the month....for an hour in the airport while I change planes. What a bummer.

February Wrap Up

Cinder by Marissa Meyer (Book 1 in the Lunar Chronicles Series)
I had heard a lot of people raving about this series online for ages, but had always dismissed it because the premise sounds ridiculous - Cinderella, but in the future and with cyborgs...what!? I downloaded book 1 onto my kindle on a whim because it was cheap and I kind of wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I was not expecting to enjoy it at all, but I picked it up one night just to flick through the first few pages and see what it was like, and then I ended up staying up until 3am and reading two thirds of it in one sitting. I normally love fairy-tale re-tellings, but combining that with the whole dystopia sci-fi thing just made the story seem a little silly to me, but if you ignore all the Cinderella stuff (which isn't really a huge part of the story anyway), it's actually a really good and exciting sci-fi adventure story. I mean, robots, cyborgs  aliens, mind control powers, a mysterious plague, what more could you want!? I would advise anyone who is inclined to scoff at the premise of this series (like I was) to just give it a go and take it for what it is - a fast-paced, exciting read set in a really intriguing world.

9 out of 10

Scarlet by Marissa Meyer (Book 2 in the Lunar Chronicles Series)
Luckily for me the sequel to Cinder came out just 2 days after I finished it, score! I liked this one a little less, but it was still really good. Cinder ends on a pretty tense cliffhanger but the second book, rather than picking it up where it left off, starts by introducing a new character. The book is divided between carrying on with Cinder's story, and telling Scarlet's which at times was irritating because as soon as you get really into the plot you'll suddenly be reading about a completely different set of characters. That being said, by about halfway through I was really engrossed by Scarlet's story too, it just took a while to get to that point.

7.5 out of 10

The New Hunger by Isaac Marion
This is a novella and the prequel to Warm Bodies which I read last month. I was expecting this to be a little disappointing because I'm much more interested in the sequel (expected publication date: 2014, woohoo!) than in the events before Warm Bodies takes place, but it was actually really good. The prequel does a good job of expanding on an already established world and giving all the characters some back story which fleshes them out a lot more. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading Nora's bits since she was a character I didn't previously find very interesting.

8 out of 10

Bright Young Things by Scarlett Thomas
I loved this book. It's about a group of intelligent 20-somethings who have all recently graduated and are now doing nothing with their lives, something which hits uncomfortably close to home for me and definitely may be part of why I liked this book so much. Anyway they all get stranded on a desert island together (which I didn't relate to quite so much) and hijinks ensue. The hows and whys of them being on this island actually aren't particularly significant, it's more like an exploration of what would happen if this group of people were all stuck in an isolated place together, very similar to the tv show Big Brother, although this book was written in like, 1999 before Big Brother came out. This book isn't for everyone, there's not a whole lot going on in the way of plot, it's mostly just about the characters getting to know each other, but I raced through it in one day and really, really enjoyed it.

9 out of 10

Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse
I love Wodehouse for all the usual reasons, but also because when I was a kid, whenever we went on holiday we would listen to a Wodehouse audiobook in the car. Because of this, reading anything by him just makes me instantly happy because from the very first page I'm immediately transported back to being 8 years old with scabby knees, excited to go on holiday and laughing with my family. There's not really much to say about this book that you couldn't guess yourself - it's silly and hilarious, I embarrassed myself a couple of times by chuckling aloud when I was reading it on the plane home. Despite the fact that this isn't a Jeeves story I still think it's fantastic and would recommend it to anyone.

10 out of 10

A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
I read this as part of my mission to make it through the complete works of Shakespeare (10 down, 34 to go!), I started with this one because it's the shortest, and also because I'd seen it performed at the Globe so I was pretty familiar with the story. I enjoyed it, it was funny, but it did kind of challenge my suspension of disbelief with how freaking stupid almost every single character is. The plot is centered around two sets of identical twins who have been separated since birth...and for some reason have the same names. Nearly every character in the story is aware of the whole long lost twin situation, and yet when everyone starts getting very confused at people accusing them of things they didn't actually do etc, not one person puts two and two together until they actually come face to face with each other and even then the freaking DUKE is all "which one of you is real and which one of you is a demon?" He's literally just been told the story of how these twins were separated, but yeah, probably a demon. Anyway, it was still great obviously, and there's a pretty good fart joke in it too - 'A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind. Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind'.

6.5 out of 10

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
This book was just adorable and funny and lovely and I had a huge smile on my face the whole time I was reading it, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who loves books. It's only about 90 pages long so I do feel a bit guilty including it as part of my 100 books challenge, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. Although it is literally just a series of letters between a bookshop and a woman ordering books from them, which doesn't sound entertaining in the slightest, it really is, everyone go and read it! I'm going to read the sequel, the Duchess of Bloomsbury, tonight and hopefully it'll be just as good.

10 out of 10

100 books challenge progress: 2 books behind