The Tides of Time: Archaeology on the Northumbrian Coast by Caroline Hardy and Sarah Rushton

The trouble with ordering books from the library is you don’t always know what you are getting. I had hoped for a good solid book on coastal archaeology, but what I got was a hybrid funded by the Countryside Agency and published by Northumberland County Council that isn’t really quite sure what its audience is. The large format and glossy pictures suggest a coffee table book for tourists, while the blurb on the back cover promises that: "If you have an interest in the past, this book will supply all you need to develop that interest through visiting archaeological remains and perhaps even finding new sites for yourself!" (Therein lies the problem, I think: the County Council couldn’t simply produce something to read, it has to fulfill a need.)

The book is organised chronologically and thematically (resources, defences), starting with prehistoric remains, but at 96 pages, there’s not room to cover much more than the obvious landmarks, while “Finding new sites for yourself” is dealt with in less than half a page. The photographs are attractive and alongside the site descriptions are useful notes on access, while for each section there is a good “pull-out block” with a list of further reading. It is this last, with the aid of the library catalogue, which might provide me with some serious reading on local archaeology, so for that, at least, I owe it some thanks. At the reasonable price of £8.99, though, this is a nice book for visitors to take home

Pass the dictionary, please

I missed this week's Booking Through Thursday but since it seemed made for me, I decided to post on it anyway. The question was:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I think I've only got one "writing book" on my shelves, Philosophical Writing: An Introduction, which was a set book for my Master's course. I don't think I would have bought it otherwise, but I did read it, and you never know, it may come in handy one day, if only for swatting wasps.

As for the others, there are too many to list, but my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style is my treasure. I can't tell you how often that gets taken down. It's regarded the The Book in this household, and when I gave a copy to my elder son last Christmas he was delighted. It sits beside Fowler's Modern Usage, Roget's Thesaurus (a fourteenth birthday present from my parents - we're a funny family, I suppose) and a line of dictionaries: for work there are the Oxford English and Harrap's New English/French, for fun there are various dictionaries of slang, quotations and symbolism, pocket Italian and Latin dictionaries, books on grammar . . . I use online versions too, with a subscription to Merriam-Webster, and shortcuts to Chambers and several others. And they are only the tip of the iceberg of the books I regard as essential aids to writing, the stack of encyclopaedias and other reference books I couldn't live without - on science, mythology, heraldry, history. If I could only rescue one from a fire it would be Chicago, which is daft, because it's online now, but I know the layout and can find what I want in it, and anyway, it's there, just where I need it.

When I was first married and we were poor and had to make our own entertainment, we used to play games with the dictionary - usually just "I'll pick a word and you guess what it means" but occasionally a version of Call My Bluff, where you actually invent definitions - very good for the vocabulary, and great for playing with children, too.