Closing tabs

The internet does not seem to have been bountifully full of the particular kind of thing I like to link to this weekend, but here are a few decent ones:

A nice obituary for the author of My Side of the Mountain, a particular favorite of mine in childhood.

"I've collected 10 million buttons."  (FT site registration required.)

"The obvious thing was to have jelly on the glass plate."  (Via Jane.)

I think I'm almost ready to get back to work (I'd better be, as this essay is not going to write itself!).  This week mostly I've just been exercising massively and reading novels: a quite reasonable Swedish thriller called Three Seconds; a book much-awaited by me, Garth Nix's A Confusion of Princes, which does not quite touch the sublimity of his Abhorsen books but which happily made me want to reread Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret, which is unfortunately not available for Kindle; Liza Marklund's Red Wolf and Last Will, which I liked very much but due to carelessness read in the wrong order; and Helene Tursten's tediously-titled-in-translation Detective Inspector Huss.  I will definitely read the rest of Tursten's series, as I thought this one was quite good, but the only thing I really have to note about it is that the detectives are constantly eating pizza, open-faced sandwiches and Lucia buns, which made me hungry!

Update

Slogging away at novel revisions in short frequent sittings.  Think I am still on track to finish for the 25th.  Ready for semester to be over!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising; Garth Nix's Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz; and an exceptionally charming self-published novel by a talented newcomer whose book I came across because I fell for his wife's triathlon training blog last year when she and I were both training for Ironman Coeur d'Alene.  (She successfully completed the race; alas, I didn't make it to the start due to a particularly bad bout of bronchitis.)  So, strongly recommended: M. H. Van Keuren's Rhubarb.  I think comparisons of a book in this sort of vein (aliens, paranormal radio, pie!) will inevitably be first of all to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books; there's a little bit of the feel of the appealing TV series Supernatural; but really it's a very fresh and appealing novel in a mode I especially enjoy.

Bonus link:  crab computing!  (And more here.)

The black cat club

This might be the best thing I ever saw in my life!

My cold is on the mend, after three nights of sleeping for about 12 hours a pop.  Light reading around the edges: the first and second installments of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, because young-adult fantasy is by far the best genre to read when ill; before that, Arne Dahl's Misterioso which I enjoyed quite a bit but found very odd in a way that could not clearly be attributed to translator or to original author but that puzzled me considerably (weird switches in POV, slightly surreal transitions, etc. -  I wasn't convinced that they were deliberate); and Joshilyn Jackson's excellent A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty.  It really speaks to an injustice in the reviewing/prestige market in our country that Jackson's books aren't getting full-page treatment in the NYTBR....

Temples of books

At the Times Online, Simon Callow has a lovely piece on falling in love with the London Library:

When I was a member of the National Theatre Company in 1979, working with Michael Kustow on performances of a speculative re-ordering of the published sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets, I was impressed by the number of arcane publications on the subject that he was able to lay his hands on, all distinguished by an elegant little red label saying “London Library”. I'd somehow never heard of the place. Kustow promised to take me along, and if I liked it to propose me for membership. To say that I liked it is a feeble understatement: I felt, in an almost literal sense, that I had come home. It was the Tate Library apotheosised. The building is discreetly tucked into a corner of St James's Square; the front doors used to give directly on to the reception area, filled with leather-bound catalogues and wooden bookcases going up to the high ceiling, with a phalanx of librarians toiling over returns, filling in dockets for books being withdrawn, dispensing the while erudite bibliographical information. There was nothing epic about this space: it was human and intimate and private, a sort of book brothel where all special needs and tastes could be catered to. Book located, one would penetrate into the library proper, where the real romance begins.

Two further observations:

1. My English grandfather purchased a lifetime membership to the London Library in the early 1950s. He was very pleased when he contemplated (he lived well into his 90s) what good value for money he'd obtained thereby, but my frugal grandmother grumbled that there really should be a way for him to pass it on to me, perhaps in his will!

2. One of the best novels I have ever read about a librarian is Garth Nix's lovely Lirael; it is also just one of my favorite novels of all time, librarianship regardless.