Retrospective - Going Cheap

It would be possible to feed an addiction to the modern novel by simply going around the various charity shops in a small town in England and looking out for the classier stuff among the books going cheap. In Hyde alone there are at least four such shops and each has a reasonable range of paperbacks, and quite a few hardbacks, to rummage among. We were in one shop for Cancer Awareness, actually to give away a number of Mum's old 'murders', when a consignment of Bernard Cornwell arrived, to go on sale for two quid each. Now I don't regard Cornwell as classy in any sense, certainly not even close to the league of O'Brien, (a league of one) but he's certainly a top-rate popular writer and a fan would have been able to get pretty much the complete works from that shop on that day for less than thirty quid.

I didn't intend to buy any books whilst we were over in England but changed my mind when confronted by a handsome hardback of The New Oxford Book of English Verse, as edited by Helen Gardner, in another shop in Hyde (Oxfam, I think) at just one pound and eighty pence (about four Sing dollars in real money). I felt guilty to get it at that price. It now occupies pride of pace on my bedside table, where it is likely to stay on the grounds of inexhaustibility. I also picked up Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist (my original copy went missing when I left my books in the UK when I first came out to the East) along with Simon Armitage's Kid for just one pound. Now who said you needed to be rich to have fun?

All this suggests two ideas to me: 1) Charity shops are a good idea and it would be nice to see some in this city; 2) England has the kind of 'reading culture' that Singapore aspires to, which results in a surplus of worthwhile literature.