I had two trips to two libraries last week. As I live in England, but close to the Scottish border I can borrow books from both Scottish and English libraries. I’d joined the Scottish Borders Library Services earlier this year as it’s the nearest one and had already borrowed a few books. They were due back this week and I renewed The Music Room by William Fiennes and borrowed two more – Peter Robinson’s Not Safe After Dark, a collection of short crime stories. I wrote a bit about it here. I also borrowed Winnie and Wolf by A N Wilson. This is a novel about the relationship between Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler.

On Friday we joined the Northumberland County Library, where amazingly you can borrow 20 items at a time, that includes books, CDs, DVDs or Spoken Word material for three weeks. Even I couldn’t possibly get through that lot in three weeks! Time was limited for our visit as we only had an hour in the parking space and some of that time had gone walking to the library, so we did a quick tour round and came away with five books:

1. Northumberland: and the Land of the Prince Bishops by Ed Geldard, a beautiful book with photos of places along the Rivers Tees, Wear, Tyne, Coquet and Tweed. There are plenty of places for us to visit once the weather improves.
2. Walk Lothian The Borders & Fife by Richard Hallewell. Another book to look at preparing for our walks over the Border.
3. Crime on the Move: the official anthology of the Crime Writers’ Association 2005 edited by Martin Edwards. More short crime stories to enjoy. I’ve read one so far, which was excellent – On a Bicycle Made For Two – an amusing look at the tension in the build up to a bike race in the little village of Bossingham.
4. Raven Black by Ann Cleeves – more crime fiction, this time from an author who is best known for her Inspector Ramsay novels set in Northumberland. I haven’t read any of her books yet and perversely the one I’ve borrowed isn’t set in Northumberland, nor is it an Inspector Ramsay book. Raven Black is set in Shetland.
5.  Northumberland Climbing Guide (this was D’s choice). I’ve read the introduction to this book which is about the history of the crags and found that there are examples of rock art on the crags near here. I shan’t be doing any climbing, but I will be looking out for the carved goats and prehistoric spirals.