Dear Santa…

…please don’t be scared off or think me too greedy, but here is my wishlist. In an effort to be less naughty, I  might have left out a few titles!

from left to right:

Victorian Suicides: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Barbara T. Gates)

Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Michael Diamond)

The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects (Norman M.Klein)

How the Girl Guides Won the War (Janie Hampton)

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (Natasha Walter)

Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Patrizia Melzer)

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Margaret Atwood)

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Imagination (Armand Marie Leroi)

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Equality (Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen)

The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (James Robert Brown)

Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent (Anne Karpf)

VSI: Forensic Science (Jim Fraser)

The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)

The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford (Introd. India Knight)

Murder at Madingly Grange (Caroline Graham)

Putting together wishlists is almost as much fun as as giving and receiving books! I’m going to decorate cookies and bake some more Vanillekipferl and Zimtsterne now (I’m the designated baker in the family :D). Wish you all a wonderful Christmas with lots of family, books and cookies!

Uhm….update?

This is me trying to blog more often (if not necessarily better). I treated myself to the newest Flavia de Luce book, I am half-sick of shadows, and of course read it straight away. I love that Bradley brings out a new book every year but somehow it’s still not enough. Also, I love that series too much to be capable of any criticism other than that it was much too short, which is really a big compliment from me because I usually feel that most books are about 50-100 pages too long.

I used a gift voucher to get the book but as always told myself that since I hadn’t technically spent any money on the Flavia book I was allowed to get myself something else (probably how these vouchers are supposed to work, get these poor bookaholics into the store and then see what piles they end up with at the check-out!). So, I got a dvd because I still have some shelf space for those 😉 Also with the festive season cover of the Flavia book I was in the mood for a Christmas-themed dvd so I got Hogfather. I probably don’t want to know what that says about my sense of humor or Christmas spirit (I watched Home Alone, too, in case that makes it any better).

I adored the movie and that made me wonder why I hadn’t read the discworld books yet and I got a couple from the library. But I’m not always good with fantasy so I don’t know how that’ll go (I got The Colour of Magic, Monstrous Regiment, Unseen Academicals and Equal Rites, I’ve heard that it isn’t much of a problem to read these out of order so let me know which one I should start with to get me hooked!).

At the moment I’m reading Nicola Upson’s Two for Sorrow, that’s her third mystery in the Josephine Tey series. Didn’t enjoy the first one that much but decided to try again, I’ always hopeful 😀 So far I love the true crime Josephine is writing about in the book and which is of course casting long shadows into the present. The murder is definitely not cosy, it’s not cool to describe it partly from the perspective of the dying victim. I wouldn’t consider myself especially sensitive when it comes to explicitly described nastiness but then I wasn’t expecting it in a cosy mystery! The parts before and after are much better though, and if you’ve read Singled Out you can nod knowledgeably in places.

What’s going on with everyone else? And just what do I call these random and pointless posts?

Not a review

Things have been quiet here lately (again!), I’m sorry! It’s just that after analyzing texts all day, I’m just too burned out to do the same, though much less ambitious, academic and coherent, in a blog post. I really love talking about books, I just can’t find the energy for reviews at the moment. Then I thought many of you probably can’t always find the energy to read a lot of long (stretching the definition in my case) reviews, so I’ll just try posting pretty book covers and things along the line of “a great title I was recommended” or “Hey, look what I found in a box outside the uni library”. Hope that’s okay with everyone (feedback, complaints (gently-phrased, thesis-writing is killing what’s left of my nerves) and ideas are very welcome)!

So today it’s “Look what I found in a box outside the uni library”-day. They have a box where they put rejected books that anyone is free to take home. I love that box, there are real gems sometimes. And sometimes unbelievably smelly, dusty and sticky books. But yeah, today’s find was pretty good:

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

The Bang and The Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature by Zbigniew Lewicki

Also, after freaking out over my thesis outline the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided to reward myself with a quick fun book. And I remembered today that a) I still have a gift voucher from my birthday and b) unbelievably I still haven’t read the new Flavia book, so tomorrow I hope to own this one:

Hope you’re all doing well and what are you reading?