Gutted

Amy Davidson on the Charlie Hebdo attack.

A most lovely present

I have been feeling physically rather low due to this cold - exercise deprivation is bad for the morale! - only it was a week with lots of good news concerning students and even my own fortunes (a work promotion that I will report here once it has cleared the necessary layers of bureaucracy), and now I have just received the best present EVER in the mail - a painting of my ideal bookshelf, a token of thanks from A. and O. for post-Sandy hospitality. This is amazing! I just laid it flat across the scanner to give you the impression, but it doesn't do justice to its lovely proportions. Click for a bigger bookshelf.

The ideal bookshelf

The data behind My Ideal Bookshelf. (Via BoingBoing.)

(Amy has commissioned one of these paintings for me as a present, and now I have to decide what books to select! I am leaning towards a subset of the style books, as I'd love to have a sort of visual representation of that project - Emma, Madame Bovary, The Golden Bowl, Proust vol. 1, The Line of Beauty, Barthes and Koestenbaum and St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, the Anthony Burgess 99 Novels - but it seems a little narrow, I may go more eclectically in the direction of lifetime reading of significance to me (Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, Pride and Prejudice, a book each by Diana Wynne Jones and Dick Francis, David Copperfield, Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Richard Holmes's The Pursuit, Clarissa!).