Last week we managed a few days’ holiday in Somerset – our first trip away from home in over seven months (the last one was to Hay-on-Wye). Though only an hour and a half from where we live, it felt like a world away. We were very lucky with the weather, too. We wandered the quiet nature reserves of the Avalon Marshes, toured Glastonbury and Wells (the smallest cathedral city in the UK; alas, we missed the limited cathedral opening hours, but had a nice walk around the outside and saw a plaque marking where Elizabeth Goudge lived), and climbed Glastonbury Tor and Ebber Gorge. Not wanting to chance any pubs, we ate daytime meals outdoors at a few cafés and brought posh supermarket takeaways with us to heat up in the Airbnb kitchen for dinners.

A great white egret at Ham Wall.

Rhynes (traditional drainage ditches) at Shapwick Heath.

After the walk up Glastonbury Tor.

Ebber Gorge.

(Photos by Chris Foster)

I read from lots of different books on the trip, but my most appropriate selection was Skylarks with Rosie, Stephen Moss’s diary of the coronavirus spring experienced in Somerset. By coincidence, my husband saw Moss (a mentor of his; we’ve met him a number of times before) filming at Ham Wall when he went back there early one morning!

On the last day, we drove back via Bookbarn International, a favourite secondhand bookshop of mine. Below is my book haul from the trip: the top five were from a Little Free Library we found in a bus shelter in the delightfully named town of Queen Camel and the bottom stack was from Bookbarn, which was looking well stocked after the lockdown. I was particularly pleased to find books by Amy Bloom, Sue Miller, and Jane Smiley, authors you don’t come across so often in the UK. Some of the LFL books have rather hideous covers, but it’s the inside that counts, yes?

Overhaul of Previous Trips’ Purchases

This was our seventh trip to Bookbarn since June 2013. I don’t seem to have any photos of that first visit, but for all the rest I have at least one book haul photo.

Simon of Stuck in a Book runs a regular blog feature he calls “The Overhaul,” where he revisits a book haul from some time ago and takes stock of what he’s read, what he still owns, etc. (here’s the most recent one). With his permission, I’m borrowing the title and format to look back at what I’ve bought at Bookbarn over the years and how much I still have left to read.

Date: July 2015

Number of books bought: 8 [the Allen and Cobbett are reference books for my husband]

• Read: 7
• No longer owned: 2 (I resold the Fitzgerald and Levy)
• Remaining unread: 1 (Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz – so I took it with me on the Somerset trip and have read the first 50 pages so far.)

This is a very good showing for me! I suppose I did have nearly six years to get through them all. I’ve done less well on the other years’ hauls…

Date: July 2016

Number of books bought: 10

• Had read already: 1 (Rachman)
• Read since: 4
• No longer owned: 1 (Irving’s early work hasn’t been to my taste, so after my husband read The Water-Method Man, I donated it; its only virtue in my eyes is that the main character is called “Bogus Trumper”)
• Remaining unread: 4 (Chatwin, Coe, McCarthy, O’Hanlon)

Date: December 2016

Number of books bought: 13 (the two pictured at left were from another shop)

• Read: 6
• DNFed and gave away: 3 (Lurie, Smith, Wheen)
• Remaining unread: 4 (Barnes, Ellman biography, Godwin, Mantel)

Date: October 2017 (multiple photos in this post)

Number of books bought: 15

• Read: 5
• Skimmed: 1 (McCarthy)
• DNFed: 1 (McNeillie)
• Remaining unread: 8! (I have a bad habit of letting biographies sit around unread)

Date: February 2020

Number of books bought: 14

• Had read already: 2
• Skimmed: 2
• Started reading but set aside: 2, so…
• Remaining unread: 10!

To encourage myself to get to more of these previous acquisitions, I’ve added six of them to my bedside stack.