Leicester Book Festival and Kibworth Bookshop

A good bookshop is a joyous thing and although the city no longer has one there's a little gem of a bookshop out in one of the villages not far out of town. It's 15 minutes on the bus from work, and I get a handy half hour in there before the first bus back to town. Truly it could get expensive, I went along today to have a quick chat with Debbie (the lovely owner) about Leicester Book Festival which is basically her baby and now going into it's second year.

Events start next week and stretch over the next month, some of them are free, all are really reasonably priced and most things happen in the evenings so altogether perfect for fitting around work. It's a great project which deserves all the support it can get.

It turns out that Debbie's taste in books is reasonably (really) similar to mine, her shop is a mix of books I have and books I want - 3 of the books I wanted are now books I have (Rupert of Hentzau, H E Bates 'Through the Woods' in a lovely Little Toller edition, and a Stefan Zweig, once again proving that that the moment I have a book in hand it's going nowhere but home with me ) it would have been easy to keep on buying. It's only a small shop, but it's got a great range - though obviously I'm biased because they're all the sort of books I love - and that's the joyousness of it; I can browse round Smith's or Waterstones for an age and find nothing at all that appeals but a couple of minutes in a shop like this is exciting and inspiring. Of course there are plenty of times when the big chains don't disappoint, especially in the bigger branches where there's more room for staff to have some fun with the range but it's good to know there's somewhere like the Kibworth Book Shop within easy reach too.