thriftyI am of course not really buying books. Oh, no. I still have a huge To Read pile, so buying books would be silly, wouldn't it? However, I've just been reading the study guide for the Advanced Creative Writing Course and it says we should have a good book on grammar and punctuation on our reference shelves and it recommended The Student's Guide to Writing: Grammar, punctuation and spelling by John Peck and Martin Coyle. While I was ordering, I thought I'd also buy Understanding Novels by Thomas C. Foster, which is not a book for writers, but it looks as though it could be rather useful, especially as many of my fellow students on the third level Advanced Creative Writing course will have been doing the literature courses, which I carefully avoided throughout my degree. I'm hoping that I will be able to use it as a bluffer's guide to being able to talk about literature without looking a idiot. :)
And then I saw that the new Terry Pratchett is out in a few days time, so I ordered that and then, based on my purchases of the Meade Faulkner books, Amazon recommended The Riddle of the Sands, which is one of those classic novels, often regarded as the first modern thriller.
As the weather becomes more autumnal, I need to settle down to study and work and be much more diligent than I have over the summer. But I need to set aside time for reading. I've been cramming it in at odd moments, but it would be much better to go and read a book for an hour or even watch a TV programme than to sit staring at the computer screen, waiting for someone to write something interesting on LJ or looking to see if there's a new Lolcat yet.
