You know you're on holiday when you set your phone to silent, put away your book, brew tea and find a shaded chair, to play Rat on a Scooter. I had to beat my brother's high score (on my phone! It's like the old days, when someone beat your highscore on snake and you had to beat them or commit social suicide). Killed him, 146 points to his 106 ( Read more... )

Comparing the postcolonial projects of Coetzee and Gordimer would be a dream come true. Why am I stuck as an undergraduate with nothing fun to research for the next two years ( Read more... )

A cardboard box, containing ten books was just delivered to me. I love Amazon!

5 Woolf books: The Waves, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, The Years and Between the Acts; two Stein, Tender Buttons (modernist experimentation at its best, I'm told) and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Morrison's Beloved, and two books on Narrative Theory ( Read more... )

I've finished Englenes Spill (The Angel's Game, I think, is the English title), the perquel to The Shadow of the Wind. The dust jacket informed me that this is to be the second of four novels, and the book had an intermittent feel to it.

It's set a generation before the first novel, involving the parents of The Shadow of the Wind's protagonist. ( Read more... )

I finished Faulks' Human Traces, some time ago. And I think I've written that it was a brick before? Well, it took sheer strength of will to stick with it through the insane digressions and long lectures, but in the heart-breaking beauty of the end. As Daniel dies in the mountains, Sonia knows her husband has been unfaithful, Thomas suffers from ( Read more... )

I'm trying to find out what I should read, what I have (and where) and what I need to buy. So, I figured a list is convenient. So, in no particular order, books that I either must read, would like to read or feel I should read:

Victorian London, by Picard. I'm not reading it as much as leafing through. What posessed me to buy it, I wonder.
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I just drowned in a cup of steaming coffee. And in a month or so, I will be drowning in a cup of Starbucks' steaming cappucino. It is always the very first thing I do when I arrive, locate a Starbucks and go be decadent. London calling <3 ( Read more... )

Fog is descending on the world outside my windows, I have tea and social psychology. Roger and Kåre-Bjarne, the two faces depicted on the book's cover, named by me and Kristine, have done an incredible amount of desperate things in my mind over the course of the 150-60 pages I have read. And, when I can work up the courage, I am starting over again ( Read more... )

"Special Topics in Calamity Physics", wtf? Finished by sheer willpower, I do not think I will ever work up the stamina to re-read it. If I ever do publish something, someone please tell me if it's reading like an early, fake (taking a leaf out of "The Lambs of London" (alas, Blue has gotten to me, I'm referencing other works in my writing)) and bad ( Read more... )

I am so much wiser for reading; not because I can express myself more accurately, throw more references about me or flaunt my knowledge of obscure authors; because I have, in my short lifetime, known more people than the non-reading will in lives twice, or thrice, the length of mine. There are the acquaintances I would never admit to in public, the ( Read more... )