Harry Potter and I go back some way, as the earlier years of this journal attest. I wasn’t quite in the throes of pubescent adolescence when I discovered the books, as I was when I discovered Hanson, the first of my three great teenage obsessions (Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles being the third, and, perhaps, the most enduring). There was a time ( Read more... )

So for Easter I went away to the north coast with my boyfriend and his family. This was the view from the house:


( Read more... )

It hit 36 degrees today, so when I went to swim laps after uni the pool was massively crowded and even in the slow lane I had people bumping into me by swimming on the wrong side of the lane, or being asshats and walking and talking in pairs instead of swimming. My laps were therefore not as relaxing as usual, but afterwards I went and floated ( Read more... )

Tagged by mothergoddamn.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

' ( Read more... )

Right, that is it. I am saying no to epistolary novels and multiple-source narratives. No more faux:

• Letters;
  
• Emails;
  
• Memorandums;
  
• Blog Posts;
  
• Blog Comments;
  
• IM Conversations;
  
• Notes Passed in Class;
  
• Historical Documents;
  
• Poems;
  
• Novels-within-novels;
  
• Plays-within-novels;
  
• Transcripts of Telephone Conversations;
  
• Script Format for Conversations;
  
• ( Read more... )

Still being afraid of reading a new book, I turned to Corfu while travelling this weekend. It is the perfect travelling book, being itself about journeys, and it was also the perfect accompaniment to my weekend contemplation of nostalgia.

Corfu is by Robert Dessaix, who writes beautifully, with sensitivity and a firm touch; it is just the ( Read more... )

I recently decided that it was all very well whinging about how I didn’t read much for pleasure any more because I was busy and it wasn’t pleasurable and was like work and I’m in this years-long reading funk and the wine has no taste any more and blah, blah, blah, but if I seriously missed reading so much then why didn’t I just pick up a book and ( Read more... )

I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray when I was sixteen. It had a profound effect on me. The central concept was like nothing I had read before, the characters carefully etched, the language intensely beautiful. It was the beginning of my love affair with Oscar Wilde and his works, which reached its grandest highs (and lows) when I wrote my ( Read more... )

At dinner the other night I tried to tell a story about an article I had been reading. The article, without going into too much detail, is a Freudian reading of a children's film. It's funny and well-argued, but the point of my story was the initial absurdist nature of the topic. But I chose my audience incorrectly, for the first comment was, "Why ( Read more... )

Ergh. I'm so listless these days. Partly because I'm incredibly busy, something that I still find laughable, because honestly, what am I doing in my life? Nothing much, not compared to high school and my first degree, when I spent years doing fifty things all at once and being stressed out all the damn time. I am now much more careful in selecting ( Read more... )