Not everyone comments on library books by blogging about them. Oh dear. Stories like this really make me not want to work in public libraries when I qualify, despite how much I love them in theory. Say what you like about students and academics, they don't tend to be as free with their bodily fluids as public library users (there used to be a regular at Eastbourne library who would piss in the stacks quite openly, IIRC.)

Tags: libraries

11:56

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Book 43: Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce
Another spoofy noir thriller. Except it was more thriller than spoof. No bad thing, but perhaps I would have chortled knowingly a bit more if I'd been from Aberystwyth, or indeed had ever been there at all.

Observant readers will have noticed that I am drawing fairly close to the 50 book mark. What to do when I have technically completed the challenge? It's tempting to set a new target of 100, but I suspect that I won't reach it what with the wedding and the dissertation and everything. So I'll just keep counting and see where I get to. I don't feel the need to 'win' or anything, but I have enjoyed the process of recording something, however brief, about what I've read. When you read constantly it's all too easy to devour and forget.

Tags: 50 Book Challenge

11:33

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I used to think it was distinctly odd when a woman took her husband's name. I mean, it wasn't like she became a different person when she got married, why have a different name? People getting married are still two separate people, not halves of the same thing (and the husband's 'thing' at that).

However, I've now decided that I AM going to take Matt's name in 18 days' time (though not for work, academic or creative purposes, so I guess I'll have two names simultaneously). It feels right. In a way I WILL be a different person, or at least I'll be starting a new part of my life. In some cultures people get a new name when they enter adulthood; I'm getting one when I enter the part of my life lived side by side with Matt. And I want us both to have the same name as our kids, to be a unit. More importantly, I feel like I'm assuming a secret identity - I can do all sorts of things with my new name and they won't be connected to the other me bwhahaha! (My current name is fairly distinctive, which is good for a poet but less good if I want to cause anonymous havoc.)

Off to start practising my signature...

Tags: wedding names

09:47

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Book 41: The Mortdecai Trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli
I'd never heard of these books but they sounded promising given that they seemed to be an amalgam of PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming... and yes they were pretty entertaining I suppose. Lots of international intrigue, high living and black humour. They were also sexist and racist and the third book was downright unpleasant. And I firmly believe that if you're going display such an obvious stylistic debt to another author (Wodehouse) then you shouldn't *mention* that author in the text quite so much. It can only invite unfavourable comparison and besides it's Bad Form.

Book 42: The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Thought I'd curl up with some light reading now I'm done with work. This was very heartwarming and easy to read and all that, and I enjoyed the characters and setting. Structurally it was all over the place though. (But since this is what I've always known would be my fatal flaw if *I* were to attempt to write a novel, I don't judge too harshly.)

Tags: 50 Book Challenge

10:47

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