Little Travels and Roadside Sketches
¥8.09
Classic short story, first published under the pen name "Titmarsh". Classic short story, first published in 1854. According to Wikipedia: "Thackeray is most often compared to one other great novelist of Victorian literature, Charles Dickens. During the Victorian era, he was ranked second only to Dickens, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he was able to satirize whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It also features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. As a result, unlike Thackeray's other novels, it remains popular with the general reading public; it is a standard fixture in university courses and has been repeatedly adapted for movies and television. In Thackeray's own day, some commentators, such as Anthony Trollope, ranked his History of Henry Esmond as his greatest work, perhaps because it expressed Victorian values of duty and earnestness, as did some of his other later novels. It is perhaps for this reason that they have not survived as well as Vanity Fair, which satirizes those values."
Edinburgh
¥8.09
Classic travelogue. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."
Basque Country
¥88.19
The Basque Country is a land of fascinating paradoxes and enigmas. Home to one of Europe's oldest peoples and most mysterious languages, with a living folklore rich in archaic rituals and dances, it also boasts a dynamic post-modern energy, with the reinvention of Bilbao creating a model for the twenty-first-century city of cultural services and information technologies. Hugging the elbow of the Bay of Biscay on both the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees, this small territory abounds in big contrasts, ranging from moist green valleys to semi-desert badlands, from snowy sierras to sandy beaches, from harsh industrial landscapes to bucolic beech woods.This often idyllic scenery is the stage for fierce political passions. Almost every aspect of the Basque Country generates passionate disagreement, even its precise location. Spanish and French centralism, often authoritarian and sometimes brutal, has met with resistance for two centuries. Most recently and notoriously ETA, a terrorist group with deep popular support, has engaged in a bloody 45-year conflict. But many Basques consider themselves full French or Spanish citizens, and fear political and linguistic exclusion under Basque nationalist rule.
Japanese Gardens Revealed and Explained
¥24.44
Japanese Gardens - Revealed and Explained is comprehensive and thorough in its coverage of the subject of Japanese gardens and provides the reader with a journey through their history, meaning and eye catching beauty. All aspects of Japanese gardens and gardening are covered from design to ingredients and it even covers subjects like pruning techniques as well as numerous suggestions of what to plant in a Japanese garden courtesy of Master gardener L.H. Bailey. Discover Zen gardens (sometimes known as Japanese Rock gardens) and the deliberate ease of their appearance on the eye,meaning and design.This book is suitable for beginners right the way through to more experienced enthusiasts of Japanese gardens. Lovingly put together by the author and editor Russ Chard - a Japanese garden enthusiast and writer for over 10 years.Weblinks are included to Youtube videos to see how the author built a small space Japanese Zen garden at his home. This book is not plumped up with photographs, just 70 pages of pure Japanese garden information. The subject is complicated but Japanese gardens - Revealed and Explained is in plain English and simplified and explained for ease of learning. Anyone with ambitions to create and build a Japanese garden or Zen garden would find this book a very useful companion to their dream and plans through to the finished garden.
The Cotswolds
¥24.44
These glorious hills, rightly described as an area of outstanding natural beauty, contain a treasure trove of spectacular views, along with flowers and wildlife just asking to be photographed. In the following pages I take you through the seasons, offering just a taste of what can be seen, in the hope that it will tempt you to explore this wonderful countryside for yourselves. From hidden gems like the stone crocodile head on a fresh water spring in Compton Abdale, and fearsome gargoyles staring down at you from ancient churches, to the grandeur of castles and the splendour of stately homes, I hope to bring the Cotswolds alive for you with the help of my camera. So as not to spoil the images with excess wording I have let the pictures speak for theirselves but at the back of the book you will find a page-by-page explanation of the photographs, along with the locations. This book was made possible by the help and kindness shown to me by the various attractions, allowing me to roam freely over their properties in search of interesting views, fascinating artefacts and plentiful wildlife
Come, Tell Me How You Live:An Archaeological Memoir
¥58.47
Agatha Christie’s personal memoirs about her travels to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan, where she worked on the digs and wrote some of her most evocative novels. Think you know Agatha Christie? Think again! To the world she was Agatha Christie, legendary author of bestselling whodunits. But in the 1930s she wore a different hat, travelling with her husband, renowned archaeologist Max Mallowan, as he investigated the buried ruins and ancient wonders of Syria and Iraq. When friends asked what this strange ‘other life’ was like, she decided to answer their questions by writing down her adventures in this eye-opening book. Described by the author as a ‘meandering chronicle of life on an archaeological dig’, Come, Tell Me How You Live is Agatha Christie's very personal memoir of her time spent in this breathtaking corner of the globe, living among the working men in tents in the desert where recorded human history began. Acclaimed as ‘a pure pleasure to read’, it is an altogether remarkable and increasingly poignant narrative, a fascinating, vibrant and vivid portrait of everyday life in a world now long since vanished.