How to buy books cheaply

I went to London recently and did lots of good stuff. One of the things was visiting the Book and Comic exchange by Notting Hill Gate tube station, at 14 Pembridge Road. It's worth popping by if you're in the mood for paperbacks and are in the area -- actually I made a special trip out there from paperback yearning. If you have books to spare you can get credit for them, or even cash money I think. They have a policy of discounting stuff quite aggressively until it makes its way down to the basement, where everything is 50p. I spent the best part of an hour there and still didn't quite get round the whole of the basement, let alone the ground floor, which has rather more serious stuff in it. I bought 11 books, three of them from my amazon wishlist (which is the definition of a good rather than an impulse buy), for a total of five pounds fifty. Hurray! I had to smuggle them into the house past my mother, who thinks that people who want to keep lots of books ought to have their own house, and she does sort of have a point there.

At the moment I am reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. It's Big Fantasy, with a cast of thousands, and legends and back stories by the dozens, and it slips down very easy. It's a nice contrasting break from my Ismail Kadare and Javier Marías marathon.