I tend to scour charity shops for English-language books. I buy anything that sounds good (I look at the blurb and the first few pages), and have found some great new-to-me authors that way. Most charity shops have an ‘other languages’ section, which is alphabetical. Others put all the languages together. Why I have no idea, because I have no wish to plough through 95% of the books to find the 5% that are in English. Prices per book range from less than a dollar to $2.
Here is my present TBR pile
- The Lars Kepler and Henning Mankell are both in Swedish. They always produce great Scandi-noir books, so if you like that, I can recommend. Both authors are widely translated.
- Clare Mackintosh is one of my favourite authors so I ordered It’s Not What You Think new, and bought After the End secondhand.
- I enjoy Lucinda Riley, Liza Marklund, Peter James and John Grisham, so I bought these on a whim. They are not my favourite authors but their work is almost always enjoyable.
- Sarah Paretsky, Tom Spencer, and Michael Palmer are new to me but I received two books free with purchase at the local charity shop and I battled to find anything else. I would be interested in whether they are known and loved or hated by any of my readers.
- Terms and Conditions ended up in my pile somehow. It turned out to be a fake-marriage billionaire romance, so it is going into our apartment building’s communal library.
- Fighting the First Wave by Peter Baldwin was brand new, and I bought it for work. It describes different countries’ approaches to the Covid19 pandemic. Sweden features heavily because the Swedish approach differed so widely from other countries, so it will be great for discussions with my students. Sweden has not been at war for over 200 years, and there was almost no legislation in place for this type of emergency situation. Lockdowns were also not allowed due to two of the four fundamental laws, and there is no ministerial rule. Explaining this to people from other countries is quite complicated.
Sara Paretsky is one of the crime fic queens! She’s way into the series now and some of the more recent ones have felt weaker, but the early ones are hard-hitting and influential in the context of a female PI.
Thank you for this Sharon! I have never read her before, and it is always nice to discover a new author. I see this one is the 18th in the series so if I like it I will definitely start at the beginning. At the moment I am reading Ann Cleeves The Long Call, which features a new (to me) detective – Matthew Venn. I have only read the Shetland and Vera ones before.