The Casual Vacancy and other stories
Long time no see, everyone. How are you all?
Uni is getting on, but even though there are times where it seems this year is just full of stressing out and deadlines and too much work, I seem to suddenly have a huge amount of free time for reading. I also suddenly have a huge amount of free money for books - my uni gives some of us poor students a books bursary every year to be spent on textbooks in the uni bookshop, but the uni bookshop doesn't stock foreign language textbooks so I ordered mine online, leaving me over a hundred quid to spend on other reading material. So I went into the bookshop and picked through the penguin classics (got a copy of Muriel Spark's 'The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie' which I love for the mentions of magical Edinburgh place names) and then when I went up to pay, there was a huge stack of JK Rowling's new novel 'The Casual Vacancy' sitting on the counter, so I grabbed one of those too.
Without spoiling anything, it's a gem of a novel. I adored it, and cried quite a bit at the end. It's the type of book you read and then can't stop thinking about for days afterwards. The characters are beautifully in-depth. It's described in the blurb as 'a big novel about a small town'; which sums it up pretty accurately. JKR's style is wonderfully readable, I fell into the world of Pagford immediately. In short, it's stunning, and you should all go and buy a copy right now (just don't expect anything similar to Harry Potter, because it's about as different as it could be).
(And now I might have the tiniest crush on the guy who works in the bookshop (or, as I've imaginatively named him, 'Bookshop Guy'). He's got curly hair (need I say more?). The first time I went in, he said he liked my coat and said he'd happily wear women's clothes if they all looked like that, and when I called in earlier today to pick up my pre-ordered copy of Zadie Smith's 'NW', he was fascinated by the cover illustration and asked me what it was about and who Zadie Smith was (clearly you don't need to know anything about books to work in a bookshop, then). Only downside: he spelt my name wrong, even though I spelled it out for him. Verdict: might find more excuses to call into the bookshop).
- In other important news: I bought my first item on ebay and felt cool; my little laptop broke last week so now I'm tapping away and getting confused on a borrowed netbook which doesn't have Office 2010 or Photoshop or Google Chrome or iTunes so I feel like my life is on hold for a little while until my laptop does a Lazarus and comes back to life; I've enjoyed all the episodes of QI so far (especially the fact that there's been a decent number of funny women comedians on recently, inclusing Cal Wilson who I'd never heard of before but loved), 'Mock The Week' (nice to see Josh Widdicombe appearing regularly, have quite a lot of love for him (plus I saw him before he was famous, so yay)), and loving the new run of '8 Out Of 10 Cats' (less than 2 weeks till I see Jon Richardson), and still adoring 'The Thick Of It' (although I haven't seen last week's episode yet because the sister wanted to watch X Factor so I had to watch that too and jeez that programme just never seems to end (but that said, there's some talented people on there this year, but you just know that if they have a career in music at all they'll be ruined just like Diana Vickers).
Uni is getting on, but even though there are times where it seems this year is just full of stressing out and deadlines and too much work, I seem to suddenly have a huge amount of free time for reading. I also suddenly have a huge amount of free money for books - my uni gives some of us poor students a books bursary every year to be spent on textbooks in the uni bookshop, but the uni bookshop doesn't stock foreign language textbooks so I ordered mine online, leaving me over a hundred quid to spend on other reading material. So I went into the bookshop and picked through the penguin classics (got a copy of Muriel Spark's 'The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie' which I love for the mentions of magical Edinburgh place names) and then when I went up to pay, there was a huge stack of JK Rowling's new novel 'The Casual Vacancy' sitting on the counter, so I grabbed one of those too.
Without spoiling anything, it's a gem of a novel. I adored it, and cried quite a bit at the end. It's the type of book you read and then can't stop thinking about for days afterwards. The characters are beautifully in-depth. It's described in the blurb as 'a big novel about a small town'; which sums it up pretty accurately. JKR's style is wonderfully readable, I fell into the world of Pagford immediately. In short, it's stunning, and you should all go and buy a copy right now (just don't expect anything similar to Harry Potter, because it's about as different as it could be).
(And now I might have the tiniest crush on the guy who works in the bookshop (or, as I've imaginatively named him, 'Bookshop Guy'). He's got curly hair (need I say more?). The first time I went in, he said he liked my coat and said he'd happily wear women's clothes if they all looked like that, and when I called in earlier today to pick up my pre-ordered copy of Zadie Smith's 'NW', he was fascinated by the cover illustration and asked me what it was about and who Zadie Smith was (clearly you don't need to know anything about books to work in a bookshop, then). Only downside: he spelt my name wrong, even though I spelled it out for him. Verdict: might find more excuses to call into the bookshop).
- In other important news: I bought my first item on ebay and felt cool; my little laptop broke last week so now I'm tapping away and getting confused on a borrowed netbook which doesn't have Office 2010 or Photoshop or Google Chrome or iTunes so I feel like my life is on hold for a little while until my laptop does a Lazarus and comes back to life; I've enjoyed all the episodes of QI so far (especially the fact that there's been a decent number of funny women comedians on recently, inclusing Cal Wilson who I'd never heard of before but loved), 'Mock The Week' (nice to see Josh Widdicombe appearing regularly, have quite a lot of love for him (plus I saw him before he was famous, so yay)), and loving the new run of '8 Out Of 10 Cats' (less than 2 weeks till I see Jon Richardson), and still adoring 'The Thick Of It' (although I haven't seen last week's episode yet because the sister wanted to watch X Factor so I had to watch that too and jeez that programme just never seems to end (but that said, there's some talented people on there this year, but you just know that if they have a career in music at all they'll be ruined just like Diana Vickers).