Hello, o world, I haven’t posted for rather a long time but am wrestling with my first book review. It is much harder to write than I anticipated. Having spent several years flitting among the groves of book blogs I had rashly myself that it couldn’t be so difficult to do; I now have a whole new respect for book bloggers. I incline towards verbose and the ponderous, I've found.
(Should you care, the books pictured are Medieval Wall Paintings by Roger Rosewell, Akiga's Story, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Oresteia by Aeschylus, Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann, Anecdotes of Destiny by Isak Dinesen and Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith.)
Meanwhile, world, cast your gaze upwards and behold! I have created a banner for this ’ere web log. It is neither original in concept nor especially competent in execution, but I feel proud. Here’s the original photograph:
(Nice light switch eh?)
I had planned to photograph a shelf of books but that part of our home is darker than a monk’s armpit so instead I started picking out books which had particular meaning for me and heaping them on the sofa prior to arranging them attractively on the sewing machine. I had to do this very quickly as I spend my days looking after a very nosy, bossy toddler and tasks like this have to be crammed into her nap time, and I was further restricted by the selection of books I have available since, aged as I am, I still keep boxes and shelves of books at my (lucky) parents’ house and they are only gradually trickling over the Channel to this house. Halfway through the baby awoke so I shoved a handful of the books on the sewing machine, snapped a couple of shots and had to make do with that – and when I saw the result I was mortified. Any visitor would take one look at the poncey array of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton and speed back into the aether screaming. So hurrah for cropping.
I probably am a bit of a poncey mcponce though, even though I have to admit I've not reread The Faerie Queene since I graduated. (I should.)