I.e. have finally reached a stage with The Sekkrit Projekt where it is not eating my entire life and I have a little wiggle room for doing some me-reading that isn't something short on the Kobo while I'm commuting or sitting in a waiting-room.

What I read

Finished the Tanya Huff short story collection, He Said, Sidhe Said. Read 2 Robert van Gulik ( Read more... )

I posted recently something about the Great Tate Gallery Archives archive-corruption case (art forgery scammer playing a long game inserts documents into the archives to provide entirely spurious provenance records). Someone should write a book, and someone has: The Conman: How One Man Fooled the Modern Art Establishment by Laney Salisbury and Aly ( Read more... )

MI PROTESTANT WORK SEXXX EFFIC, LET ME SHOW U IT: When her husband turned 40, Charla Muller couldn't decide what to give him, so she offered him guaranteed sex every night for a whole year. Could they manage it? And what would be the effect on their marriage?. Okay, I am behind the concept that there is perhaps too much emphasis on Sex Should Be ( Read more... )

There was a LOT of re-reading - not quite all of Stella Gibbons, but really a significant percentage, also the biography by her nephew, but I posted separately about that with some more general thoughts. Also Mary Renault's Kind are her answers (1940), for some reason that seemed good to me at the time, The Thirty-Nine Steps (following the tv ( Read more... )

The waste remains, the waste remains and kills:

Two reviews of Rose George's The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, which sounds like an excellent study of a neglected subject (except in the form of jokey titles like Flushed with Pride). But shouldn't the Science Editor of the Observer be a bit more aware of the history of ( Read more... )

Does anyone else want to codslap Jamie Hewlett for this?

Hewlett and Damon Albarn have been engaged on a project 'Monkey: Journey to the West':
The first salvo was the opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, a visually extravagant affair designed and animated by Hewlett ('what you see is me, what you hear is Damon'). It premiered in Manchester last ( Read more... )

Article in today's Guardian about Nushu, the 'secret women's language' of China, and the current (heritagique) revival of same. I am sure that there are those of you who know far more about this subject and can probably pick up errors and over-simplifications.

From yesterday: those frighteners about late motherhood statistically deconstructed: ( Read more... )