Book Review!

Restless, by William Boyd

This is a pretty interesting World War II spy tale. The story goes back and forth between a daughter and mother's story, the mother's during London in World War II and the daughter's in Oxford during the 1970s. Boyd obviously thought a lot about the mother's portion of the book, especially the cloak-and-dagger intrigue, which always made me excited to return to her part of the story. The daughter's chapters were also fun to read -- D. Phil. student at Oxford with leftist tendencies and friends. The two stories could have segued very well into each other, but at the end, it seemed as though the daughter's story was only an afterthought and I found myself wondering why Boyd had made her an interesting character at all if he wasn't going to tell me what happened to her at the end.

The book definitely kept me reading, but at the end I was a little upset about the lack of closure and abruptness. 3/5: good

In other news, I'm ready to stop feeling like crap. I'd like to go outside again, damn it!

End of the (birth)Day.

My hall-mates at my dorm are so wonderful! They really turned this birthday around for me. H. made chirashi sushi (pictured below), which is basically sushi in a bowl. He used (cooked) salmon and egg strips as the meat ingredients. It was so tasty, especially with nori on top! The other 3 girls brought various forms of chocolate and junk food, including a yummy chocolate toffee cake. (To see pictures, visit the links on the right-hand side of the blog!) And now to curl up in bed and sleep.

Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt

A smile for anyone who can sing along to the song from whence my title comes. I, however, don't owe my soul to the company store but instead to the walk-in NHS Clinic in Soho. I'm so glad that K. (a friend from school) told me about it. But I digress.

I managed to fall asleep at 3am last night after propping myself up with various sweatshirts and travel pillows to avoid getting vertigo since by then I had a pretty awful earache. I amused myself with episodes of Deadwood that my lovely husband sent to me, along with as many pieces of saltwater taffy from Tremblay's that he could fit in the envelope.

The big decision was whether or not to take public transportation this morning. There was no way I was going to brave public transport during rush hour, so off I walked the 1.5 miles to Soho and managed to arrive at the Walk-in Clinic without getting lost once! (There are also private clinics, but they cost around $120 just to see someone, so I was willing to walk the extra mile for a government operated one.)

The clinic itself was clean (and free!!); the nurse practitioner I saw was helpful and thorough; and the end result of my journey was a packet of antibiotics that only cost me $12. I have a throat and middle-ear infection and since I have mitral-valve prolapse, doctors always err on the side of antibiotics for me. I'm still scared I'm going to get vertigo, but I am so very happy that this sordid chapter in my London wanderings may be drawing to a close.

What of my birthday? Well, I plan to spend it in bed with my computer and a book. I may be naughty and throw a bar of chocolate into the mix as well. Tonight my hall-mate is making me homemade sushi, and provided I'm feeling human, we're going to watch Harry Potter!

Frivolity!

Nom nom nom nom (that's the sound of cats eating, promise).



Kevin! Go! Get thee to a grocery store! Gus must take part in this grand ol' tradition!

Realization of the Day (A Two-Parter):

Always check CNN when you wake up in the morning:

I don't sleep through the night very often. I usually wake up in between my two sleep cycles completely awake and ready to start my day....at 3am. Kevin has gotten used to me rolling out of bed and wandering around the apartment like a ghost until my body says: "hey, it's 3am. This was a dumb idea." I usually check my email around that time as well as CNN. After 9-11 it's just a habit I've gotten into; I like to make sure that all my loved ones are accounted for and I can rest easy. After I make sure all my duckies are in a row, I grab a sleepy cat and join my sleeping husband for the rest of the night.

That's why it was such a shock when I clicked on CNN and saw that a bridge over the Mississippi had collapsed. "Mississippi is big," I thought to myself. "I'm sure it didn't happen in Minnesota." When I saw that it had, I quickly called Kevin (who, thankfully, answered right away) to make sure all his family were accounted for. They are, but for a brief moment my heart leapt out of my mouth, as I realized that I was too far away to do much of anything.

I'm going to be sick on my birthday. Boo.

Being sick continues. I still have a fever in the evenings and now some deity who I will forever be pissed off at decided that I should lose my voice. As the Brits would say: It's all gone pear-shaped. I went to work for a 1/2 day today until my constant coughing, sneezing, and wheezing made my boss come out from her cubicle and told me that the rest of the office didn't want what I had. At that point I stopped feeling guilty that I hadn't come in for the past few days and hightailed it out of the library to the drug store (known as the Chemist in these here parts).

The pharmacist I spoke with said that she thought it sounded like an infection, so I'll be going to a free clinic in Soho tomorrow morning to (hopefully) get some antibiotics. I'm looking at all this as a birthday present from whatever deity who gave me this damned flu in the first place. Alright, alright. I will experience the seedy underbelly of the British health care system! Woohoo!

Book Review!

Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris

Now everyone knows what I do when I'm sick! I read all day. Seriously. The only time I got up was to grab a few mugs of tea and half a sandwich for lunch!

This is by the same woman who wrote Chocolat. Basically, her shtick is to write books about people loving food, and as a consummate food lover, I have no problem with this! I'm sure her books are pretty formulaic, but since I've never read any of the other ones, I was more than okay with this book.

It's set in France during World War II. Most of you know of my love for all movies and books set in this time-period, so this book automatically became interesting to me right away. It's a book about a young girl growing up on a farm, and her mother cooking things like clafoutis and Far Breton. They make liqueurs, grow their own food, make their own goat's cheese. Basically what Kevin and I want to do when we 'grow up,' except without the constant threat of the Nazis, of course. It reminded me of the film that's out right now called The Waitress because the mother in this novel pours her soul into her culinary concoctions.

This isn't a deep book, but it didn't need to be. Definitely a good beach read or plane read. I think that Rachel, my mom, and Kevin's mom would like this book a lot, especially Harris' way of describing all the wonderful food! 3.5/5: Me Likey

What I Do All Day

Ever since I wrote the post a while back about what my job entailed, I wanted to follow it up with another post about my usual work. I look at manuscripts most of the day. I examine their binding and covers since each book looks very different from the next (this website has some neat examples of medieval binding).

One of the first things I do when I sit down with a manuscript I've never seen before is to search for signs of previous owners. I go through every page of the book to see if any owners wrote notes, letters, or ownership marks in the text. The manuscript that I'm working on right now has at least 5 different names throughout the text. Most of the random writing from the manuscripts are from the 16th and 17th century and look like the two examples of handwriting below (click on the image to make it bigger):


The manuscripts I work with are usually made in the 14th and 15th centuries. If someone hasn't figured out what works are in the manuscript, I need to read some of the manuscript and figure out what poem, story, or treatise is there. The manuscripts I look at usually have handwriting that looks like this (click on the image to make it bigger):





Since individual people are writing these manuscripts, each manuscript has a different sort of handwriting. But one can usually tell the time period the manuscript was written in based on looking at the handwriting (kind of like when you can tell someone your grandmother's age wrote a letter because it's in cursive and doesn't look like your own handwriting). It's a lot of fun to try and figure out the handwriting, but my eyes are definitely tired when I get home in the evenings!