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Happy Birthday, lilyfriend! Have a great day and may your year be academically rewarding, full of learning and laughter and all good things :)

Recent Reading

John Banville. The Sea
Poetic, mesmerizing prose; very, very beautiful, but I found this ultimately cold. And how many more times are we to read plot about outsider from lower social class entranced by family group met on holiday? Also, I wanted to slap the viewpoint character, which is never a good thing.

Ellen Kushner. The Privilege of the Sword
Wunnerful, wunnerful!! Loved it. Just a delight from start to finish - and now I want more. It also makes me want to go back and read Swordspoint as I felt considerably more sympathetic to both the main characters in that after reading this, but especially St. Vier.

Mark Haddon. A Spot of Bother
For me, a crashing disappointment. I adored The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and, granted, that was a tough act to follow. Not that this was a bad book, just nowhere near as good. Good social comedy, well observed, and very funny in places, but that kind of social comedy is not really my thing.

Julie Czerneda. Regeneration
I was really looking forward to this, and now I feel that to do it justice I need to go back and read the whole trilogy again. The first two books in this series were absolutely rivetting, but I seemed to have forgotten a whole lot between the last one and this, or she got off the rails somewhere. I found it confusing, and am still not sure who was doing what to whom. It could easily have been me.

David Mitchell. Black Swan Green
Marvellous. Of course, nothing like Cloud Atlas, but really of no lesser quality, just different. Acutely observed dialogue and place and time, and boy can this young man write. Sorry he didn't make the Booker short list, but hey, I bet he will one day.

Audrey Hepburn slacks

The Gap has a masterful marketing campaign going at the moment - well it worked for me, anyway :) Slim black pants a la those worn by Audrey Hepburn, with pics of the lovely lady in the window to make you feel nostalgic and dream of looking like her if you put them on. I thought I was going to make a fool of myself even trying them on, but *mais non!* They fit like a dream, so I bought some. And a nice white shirt to go with them. Can you still be a gamine at "a certain age"??