AbeBooks' Reading Copy

The blog at Bon Appétit magazine asks do you have your Grandma’s first cookbook? I don’t but judging by the comments on this post a few people do. My grandmother used to jot her best (customised) recipes on down on small pieces of paper and tuck them inside the covers of a few cookery books. [...]

A lady called Diane Plumley has written at the Bookshop blog about how she discovered The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield after reading an AbeBooks feature on twins in literature. Hurrah!

We should applaud anything that puts books into people’s hands and encourages reading. So this morning we are giving a round of applause to Becks and Posh Spice (that’s David Beckham, the well known association football player, and his wife Victoria, formerly of the popular music group, The Spice Girls). Apparently this most showbiz of [...]

I’m reading E Nesbit’s The Railway Children (an old Puffin film tie-in edition with Jenny Agutter on the cover) to my eldest daughter as our book at bedtime at the moment. I didn’t read this book, first published in 1906, when I was a child so it’s something new for both us. To be honest, [...]

I’ve been away on an extended holiday in the United Kingdom for the last few weeks and I can safely say that I haven’t thought about much about books, with one exception. We stayed at my mother’s house and in the spare room I found one of my favourite childhood books – the Sam Pig [...]

Lisa See is an acclaimed novelist these days but her break-through book – On Golden Mountain – was non-fiction and told the story of how her family moved from China to California. This is a very well researched family history that shows racism, miscommunication, love and pain, and much more as her family struggled to [...]

There is a very depressing news story from the UK today where a survey of 18,000 young people has revealed three in 10 children live in households that do not contain a single book – not even a cookery book or a road atlas or a bible/Koran etc. Somebody should have a word with the [...]

The Millions blog tells us about books that should not be read when you are pregnant. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I admit, I haven’t read the novel, but I love the movie, starring the bewitching Mia Farrow. I have purposely kept my blonde hair very short these last 8 and a half months because [...]

If you are a fan of Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger or Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True, then you might enjoy our latest selection of reading recommendations relating to twins. It was actually surprisingly easy to find twin-themed fiction – Pat Conroy, Ken Follett, Arundhati Roy, V.C. Andrews and Madeleine L’Engle [...]

Apparently, there is a wedding tomorrow…. a royal wedding at that. With all due respect to the Prince William, weddings are really about the bride. Authors agree. There are few novels about bridegrooms but there are thousands about brides. In fact, AbeBooks has almost 150,000 listings where the word ‘bride’ is mentioned in the title. [...]