Islands in the stream; strawberries and cream

Last week Scott Pack mentioned on his blog that he’d taken a couple of location-specific books with him on holiday to the Isle of Wight.

I too am off on holiday soon, and not that I’m lucky enough to be heading to a tropical island—last time I looked south Devon was neither tropical, nor and an island—but I’m just finishing up with Robinson Crusoe (on the Kindle, Tim) and have also indulged in a hardback copy of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve lined up next. It’s a coincidental quirk, but, without having read The Thousand Autumns… etc.  I’m assuming there are similarities between it and Defoe’s classic, both in historical setting and in the situations the lead characters come up against. In other words, they are complementary books.

So what I’m getting at, in a roundabout fashion, is asking you this: What two books would you recommend that go together like strawberries and cream? (I would say like peas in a pod, but don’t want to set Aliya back any steps on the road to recovery.)

The only rule is recommended books aren’t allowed to be by the same author, or a second author picking up characters from the first, a la Wide Sargasso Sea or Roger Morris’ Inspector Porfiry series.

PS Talking of Scott, Happy Birthday Bookswap.

Very sporting of them

An unusual subject for the Veggiebox this one, as my greatest sporting achievement was either a long-term spot on the subs bench of the school basketball (we never won a match in three years) or winning a fencing 'tournament' between a dozen people who had only been doing it for six weeks. (It was epee for those interested, obviously the best form of fencing. Foil, we spit on you.) Oh, and I got a yellow belt in Shotokan Karate. Sports Personality of the Year, I know.

I come from a relatively sporting family, if by sport you mean football, but I was the black sheep there as wasn't in to it, wasn't good at it and can't get excited about it.

Men's tennis was good though, eh?

Anyway, the aim of this post is in fact football related, mainly to say well done Aston Villa for being the first premiership (I'm assuming they're in the premiership, by the way) club to forego a two million pound sponsorship deal and have the name and logo of a local hospice adorn their kits in the coming season.