The anternet and other wonders

I had the Mondrian cake on my Facebook page the other day, but here's a much fuller account by the cake's creator Caitlin Freeman of the art cake enterprise...

If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!

A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)

Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.

All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!

I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.

Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).

Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.

It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....