Broad beans, borstal girl and we bought a zoo - Feb 27th-March 2nd

I’ve decided that I quite like February and March as I had another 4 day week. I had saved a few annual leave days in case of emergency but I didn’t get snowed in this year and my son seems to have inherited the same healthy genes as me. The garden has had a second good spring clean and I’m now turning my attention to the vegetable garden – peppers, tomatoes and lettuce for the green house, onions and broad beans for the allotment itself, spinach and rocket for the pots and spring onions and radishes for the salad patch.

It was a double pick for our book selection meeting this week as NLS has now reverted to a meeting every 2 months. Our team will continue to pick monthly and then send the final list bimonthly after this month. We thought it would be difficult to select 80 titles particularly that we would lose quite a few titles with the imports but it’s another good pick covering a good range of genres and subjects. Non-fiction titles include Borstal Girl by Eileen Mackenney for our true crime fan and collecting customer requests on a regular basis, Duncan Barrat’s The Sugar Girls for our history fans, We brought a zoo for our animal lovers and Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography which has been well received in the papers. The fiction is also a mixed bunch – from Jonathan Barnes The Somnambulist (steadily collecting the customer requests) to a new stand alone from Harlan Coben and from M C Beaton’s Hamish McBeth (we’re only on number 4 so far in this series) to the book of the moment - John Lanchester’s Capital.

We were struggling to select the 10 synthetic speech titles though and had to drop one of the customer requests as it turned out that the book was going to cost us £35 to purchase! We did however choose the Institute of Business Management book of last year The Cult of the Leader, a book about preventing alzheimer’s and the ever popular cook book and gardening book, 2 more customer requests – Gordon Ramsay’s fast food and Jenny Uglow’s A little history of British gardening.

The rest of the week was pretty undistinguished with the phones being busy, finishing the proof reading for New Books and catching up with the intray which was threatening to get out of hand with being short of staff for the last 2 weeks. It was also quiet on the professional development front though I have been given permission to go to the CILIP East Midlands AGM at the end of the month.