Confessions of a Bibliovore

So it was borne in on me that I hadn't posted an update to this thing in quite awhile. And I said "This must not be!!"

I'm still in the process of uploading pictures. I finally got all my beautiful Canterbury and Oxford and Hampton Court Palace pictures off my camera, but it's a slow process to transfer them to disk and take them to an internet computer. They'll be up eventually. I'm also trying to rearrange my photo album to make it slightly more logical. Ha. Good luck to me.

I went to Bath two weekends ago, home of various Regency Romance novels and also the place where Jane Austen (ah, peerless Jane!) lived for five years. It doesn't say much for Bath that she didn't, apparently, write a word the entire time she was there. Guess she was a country girl at heart. She did portay Bath in her first novel, Northanger Abbey and her last, Persuasion. Two very different views of Bath that are interesting to compare and contrast, although you have to keep in mind that she wrote the two novels at wildly different times in her life.

In addition to paying homage at the Jane Austen Centre, I also went to the Roman Baths and the Museum of Costume. All three places were really neat (although I didn't personally learn anything new at the JA Centre) and the Roman Baths in particular were fascinating for the amount of stuff that they've recovered there. In fact, something like 2/3 or 3/4 of the original Roman complex is still underground, having not been excavated because most of Bath is on top of it. Yeah, that'll hold back the ol' funding.

If you're interested in fashion and the history of fashion, the M of C is pretty cool too. It has vintage clothing and explanations of what they were made of, how politics and social attitudes informed fashion, and other stuff like that.

Bath itself is a beautiful city. It's a city ordinance that all new buildings must be made of a particular kind of white masonry called Bath stone, so when the train (or bus) comes up on Bath, all you see is this froth of white stone, spilling up and down the hillsides, shining in the sun. In its own way, it's breathtaking.

I stayed at the Bath Backpacker's Hostel which was a fun and funky place if you are ever in the area.

I didn't do anything so fun last weekend, although I did go into London to have a visit with my uncle and his family, who were in town for the weekend, and I wound up seeing "Grease" with them. That was a lot of fun, especially since it was last-minute and I didn't have time to build it up in my head. It was fun and cute, if terribly terribly loud (my seat was close to the speakers) and whoa! a lot more raunchy than I remembered either the movie or my high-school's production being. Still a grand evening.

Welp, it's late for me. Time to share my Book of the Day and get on home.

Book for Today: Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. A merciless send-up of Macbeth, set in Pratchett's Discworld and amongst the usual lunacy that this ensues. Just to give you an idea of the total nonserious parodic fun, the first page features this exchange: (in appropriate witch voice) "When shall we three meet again?" (normal voice) "Well, I can do next Tuesday." Pratchett and Discworld are always good for a story that's unpredictable, somewhat loony, and surprisingly thoughtful.