Surprise

When you're old you can treat yourself. So following a tip from someone on Twitter, I bought myself a birthday present in the form of a book subscription from Mr B's Emporium in Bath. When you sign up, they send you a link to an extensive questionnaire about your reading likes and dislikes. Then a member of their staff selects a book for you each month that they think you will enjoy. You can opt to get an email in advance telling you the author, so you can ask them to change it if you don't want it/have read it already. But I prefer to get a complete surprise.

So today my neatly packaged surprise turned up. And yes, it's a book I haven't read or even heard of: The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott. Maybe I'll like it, maybe I won't, but I'm always up for finding new authors to enjoy.

Of course it was possibly foolhardy to do this because my TBR shelf is already full (yes, nearly all my other birthday presents were books). I've started Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising, which my sister thought I would enjoy since I worship like Hilary Mantel. She's not as good a writer as Mantel but she has a similar obsession with the minutiae of daily life and the inside of her characters' heads. It requires concentration, but I'm enjoying it and she's written loads more ... there are eight in this series alone.

Another recent discovery for me is news website Yorkshire Bylines. Have a read of this unusual helpdesk conversation ...