Books from Harrogate

It's conference season and on Tuesday a colleague and I presented a paper at a conference in Harrogate. It went very well, apparently people at the session were talking about it for the rest of the conference, which was good as it is always nerve-wracking. And best of all, as we had some time before our train I persuaded my colleague to let me have ten minutes in a lovely second hand book shop, Richard Axe Books, the one that I had seen when I was in Harrogate for my graduation earlier this year but didn't have a chance to go into.
It is a lovely shop, and I quickly found a couple of books. First a collection of short stories by American humourist James Thurber, My World - and welcome to it. I read about James Thurber in a recent edition of Slightly Foxed and wanted to read him. He wrote for the New Yorker, illustrating the stories himself. The one story of his that most people will have probably have heard of is The Private Life of Walter Mitty which was made into a film starring Danny Kaye. The author of the piece in Slightly Foxed called it an 'execrable film', which I thought was a bit harsh, but the story is in this collection and I read it on Tuesday night. The film enlarges on the theme slightly, shall we say. The story itself is just a sweet, witty little piece about a man who daydreams to escape the humdrum parts of his existence - who doesn't? No spies or adventures, which I'm pretty sure I remember from the Danny Kaye film.
I also found The Nabokov - Wilson Letters 1940-1971, which I could not resist. They should be fascinating. That cleared out my purse though, so we headed off for the train at that point.
Currently my reading has gone from the fictionalised intrigues of the Caesars in I, Claudius which I finished this morning (I was surprised that it only went up to Caligula's murder but I have Claudius the God to read about Claudius' experiences as emperor) to the intrigues of the early nineteenth century with the letters of Princess Lievin, who was a political schemer.
She made a brief appearance in the Georgette Heyer I read the other day, which reminded me that I had a volume of her letters and made me curious to see what she was really like. Although I've only just started them the letters, with her sarcasms about the Duke of Wellington and George IV, are very entertaining.
Which I need, as this has been a sad week. Our sweet cat, who you can see at the top of the blog hiding under the bookshelf, went to the vet's for an operation and they found he has a tumour which has spread so far that they can't remove it. He is currently at home, happy as Larry and eating for England, seemingly oblivious to what is going on inside him, but the vet says that he does not have long to live. So until the worst happens and while he is still purring and happy, we are enjoying every extra day we have with him.