I've been reading The Uncommon Reader, a book by Alan Bennet that booklectic led me, due to it having passages about Proust. And it has indeed been a treasure: last night's passages about Proust themed charades cracked me up. This morning I read a passage in which the lead character, being fond of horses, is being encouraged to pick up Dick Francis; her response is that Swift is good on horses. This made me crack up, too, and feel like I've done well to be continuing to read the classics so that I could get jokes like this.

Anyway, time to get on with work - I've got a lot of meetings today.

Just finished reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The ending has left me feeling rather sad, which I take as, in part, a sign of exhaustion. I think I'll nap on the couch if the guys won't be leaving for another half hour or so. Then at 3 wechsler has got a van that he and I will fill with groceries and boozes and a Boo Kitty and take to the new place, where shadowdaddy will already be waiting for us (only room for three in the truck).

1006 pages really isn't all that much. If I have some time I might check to see if I've read all of the footnotes, but later (after unpacking) I can also enjoy reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which was alluded to in this book.

Well, somehow I've convinced shadowdaddy to make dinner - chicken and peanut stew. I'm too beat to stand up long enough to cook. It's pathetic; going to the store to pick up a few groceries completely wore me out. I said I'm sad; J said I'm sick. Well, okay, it's just hard to be so weak and not feel lame.

While on my way out of said grocery store, I was briefly distracted into going into a bookstore, where they had a table full of books recommended by Phillip Pullman. I am fascinated; I think I am going to add all of them to my Amazon wish list. They really do look like good reading, and I think that list gives me ideas for Christmas presents for all sorts of people.

My Sunday: sleep until 11 (blissful lack of coughing); eat the nice waffles shadowdaddy made; say goodbye to him as he went to do something fun; find wechsler in Waitrose; let him make me lunch (salad and omelette); snooze on his couch; go back home. Yep, it was quite a day.

Perhaps I'll regret not going to see Candide tonight, but, hey, maybe the weather will be crappy on Sunday and I won't want to go to Brighton and I can catch it then. That said, I don't know when else I was going to see The Quiz if I didn't go tonight ... review now up on my other blog. ("The Quiz" is about "The Grand Inquisitor" from The Brothers Karamazov.)

Sadly, I think I was motivated to some extent to see this show because I wanted to pump up the stats for my site - if I don't go to a show for two weeks, what the heck am I supposed to write about? But J and I had dinner at Trafalgar Square beforehand and walked from the theater to the Houses of Parliament afterwards, so we still managed to enjoy the nice day despite hiding out in a theater for an hour. I was actually motivated to walk toward Westminster because of the book The Amulet of Samarkand that I've been reading ... the protagonist keeps looking at them out his bedroom window and dreaming of a day when he'd have enough power to be there. I was just at a good bit when I put the book down last night, perhaps I can get in ten minutes before I fall over dead asleep ...

I've hit what I think is a watershed point in The Fugitive, but who knows, really, maybe it's just a blip so the narrator can get on with the rest of the story. Maybe I've misunderstood the title and really he is the fugitive! At any rate, I've been reading a great bit on dealing with the breakup of a relationship and the strange mental turns people take to justify their behavior, especially when you tell someone you don't want to see them anymore when it's the exact opposite of what you really want. Fascinating! Anyway, I'm at page 444 and the book is cooking along pretty well despite being put aside completely while I was in Orlando and Genoa. I'm eager to see how the rest of this book plays out.

I've got a new Charlaine Harris book to read - Grave Surprise. She has really been a treat for me since I read that first book of hers that my brother gave me. The sad thing is, I bet I'm going to want to stay up all night and read the whole thing ...

Well. wechsler and shadowdaddy got "Random Dance," I didn't. My review here. I find the whole idea of a dance piece being a big mathematical joke impossible to make sense of, but if it's somehow made wechsler a modern dance fan, then something's going right - or I've really just cracked his nut. I guess hanging out with me for this long has to have some kind of deleterious effect ... read his review and see if you think I've dragged him down the long path to artsy fartsy-ness.

Oh, and I finished Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten tonight - there's something about reading a book featuring Neanderthals playing on a professional combat croquet team at 8 in the morning that does a body good. I'll wait a bit before I get on to book four in the series, but I have really been enjoying these books.

Well, I had a good time this weekend in Madrid with spikeylady. I've never really done so much drinking whilst on vacation, but she and I really plunged into the whole Madrileno tapas bar crawl thing. A city full of bars with delicious ciders and yummy eats was really just too hard to turn my back on (and sangria and port and manzanilla and what all did I drink?). I swear I'd go back next weekend if I had enough energy to manage!

Personal high: at the Meson de la Guitarra, the guys (that are always there as far as I know, locals who play music in the back room) were sitting around in the middle, one guitar, one singer and clapper (palmas), another guy occasionally clapping or hitting the table. I joined in with some clapping, and afterwards they complimented me (either "ole" or "vale," I can't remember, but two of them smiled and nodded). I was so happy! I was there, I was able to do it, I crossed the cultural divide, I was able to participate in music that I find so beautiful that it flattens me, and yet, when I've seen it performed live, it's always felt impossible for me to ever be a part of it. And Friday, I was a part, maybe for the only time ever. It was great.

I have brought home some 6 bottles of Asturian cider, port, sherry, Cuban rum, and some honey rum. This is in addition to jamon iberico, olives, and boxes of marzipan sweets for the office. (To be clear: they are only getting the marzipan, the rest is for us.) Oh, drool! And yet, with all of this food, all I can think of right now is finishing my Charlain Harris novel. Once Brideshead Revisited was done, I lunged into this one and in less than 24 hours it is almost completed. Back to the Proust tomorrow ... and work. Ah well! One can't be on vacation forever, at least, not until you retire, and I need to get this travelling bug out of me while my knees can still handle all of the walking.

Well, The Prisoner and the Fugutive isn't quite as good as the last book (so far) - I'm at page 33 and I'm finding the narrator's endless obsession over Albertine rather unattractive. Meanwhile, in Brideshead Revisited, there's hope of the story becoming interesting as one of the main characters has become a filthy drunk. I'm interesting.

I have also left my phone at home, meaning I won't get the calls that I wouldn't have normally got, so, if you weren't planning on calling me, I won't be getting it.

And why is it that I'm always on the train that gets used to "regulate the service?" Can't I be on the one that gets there ahead of time?

I like to keep a journal as a record of what I do, but it's been so dull lately! At work yesterday I finished writing my test cases, a bit behind schedule. I hurried home as I was hungry, got a great seat on the Pic but then had to wait 10 minutes for a second District line train at Earl's Court (bleah, how can you win? - but at least my foot wasn't broken), then made tacos AND enchiladas. Afterwards, shadowdaddy and I sat on the couch doing budgety things for about two hours, trying to figure out if we can go out of town for Easter/when I'm going to Florida/the wedding in June (yes/no/one of us) and when we can get our US debt paid off. (Married people, we know how to party.) I tuckered out around 9:30 and spent half an hour reading Lost in a Good Book before I went to bed.

But really, so much of the last two weeks has been recovery, recovery. I put some lotion on my legs yesterday and realized I pretty much hadn't thought about the rest of my body or done any personal maintenance the whole time I've been sick other than feeding myself cold suppression medication. The erythromycin has been tearing up my guts, and I've attacked it the last two days with a double whammy of iron pills and oatmeal. It seems to have worked yesterday.

I do think I'm getting better as my energy levels have returned (I actually walked up two flights of steps yesterday!) but my neck is still really sore. I am tired of being sick! And can I add what a thrill it was to come home yesterday to a cleaned house? It's been falling apart around us for two weeks, and to see all of those shiny surfaces and an empty sink was just heaven! (Of course Boo did her best to undo this almost immediately.)

In an eight hour workshop today so off the LJ. This must be a relief to all on my flist as WHO WANTS TO READ MORE DULL POSTS LIKE THIS! I don't, really, so can I be better tomorrow?

I am not getting sound enough sleep (either due just to the cold or due to the pseudoephedrine messing me up, not sure). Sunday nights I had horrible dreams in which ciphergoth and I ( truly disturbing, my apologies for the bad dreams, may squick ) Then there was a tornado and the house began to float away into the air with us in it ...

This night was dreaming about 1) murdering my stepfather (I turned him into a quesadilla and semi-inadvertendly left him on the griddle too long - people kept asking what had happened to him and I really couldn't explain it very well - friend_of_tofu turned out to have been his probation officer) and 2) being welcomed back into the arms of my former best friend Ann Donovan and her boyfriend Randy Pape. I'm not sure which was more disturbing, but waking up and discovering I was still in the same situation I have been - utterly rejected by someone I adored for no discernable reason - still had that sting.

I'm exhausted. The cars outside my window wake me up too early and I keep having to look across the bed at the clock to see if I'm supposed to get up soon or if I still have time to try to get back to bed, which wakes me up more. I went to sleep at a not bad time (bit held up reading Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley) but was undone by being unable to actually fall asleep (the cold). I just want to stay home and sleep all day but instead I'll shuffle in. I need a quieter bedroom and an alarm clock on my side of the bed.

Tonight, Les Patineurs and the Beatrix Potter ballet at the Royal Opera House - my first show of the year (good lord, what was I waiting for, week three?). The rest of the week I'm expecting will be pretty quiet.

Somehow I actually read 38 books this past year. I just discovered another one I forgot - Eduard Morike's Mozart's Journey to Prague, a bizarre little novel I read as part of the "Blog a Penguin Classic" event. A lot of you signed up for this: did any of you finish your books?

I am being stymied in my efforts to get a hardback of my next volume of Proust. I even had a kindly person at Penguin send me the ISBN to help in my book searching. Number 9780713996081, where are you? It appears that everyone that got a hardback copy of the latest translation of The Prisoner and the Fugitive is holding on to it tightly. Seriously, the only place that's given me even a whiff of a hope of getting a copy is some bookstore in Turkey (go figure). Meanwhile, my addled brain has devoted rather a lot of time looking at sites about Proust. I am especially fascinated by the various characters said to inspire his characters. The seductive, secretive lady who convinces a well-placed man to marry her and ruins his social standing, setting herself up for a life in which she can never be invited to the same parties her husband is? Laure Hayman. The gorgeous duchess whose parties our narrator long dreamed of, and yet who turns out (in my mind) to love only herself? The Comtesse Greffulhe, whose husband cares not for art at all and is the perfect snob and looks exactly as I pictured him. (I also did some research on some Proustian places in Paris, so that I might visit them while we are there and have a remembrance of things passed, as it were. We'll see which we have the time to see, or if we'll just be talking about looking for the time we lost while we were there, doing other things.)

I've also put in a request for my boss and his boss to get funded to go to the conference in May. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

First: Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris, does anyone have a copy they can lend me?

Second: Thanks to finishing Queueing for Beginners (a great gift about various quotidian elements of English culture, bathtubgin, thanks so much! - and, does anyone want to borrow it?), I managed a record breaking 37 books this year. I've, as usual, got about 8 books on the burner right now - Connie Willis' Water Witch, Robin McKinley's Dragon Haven, Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, the second Jasper Fforde book, a few short story collections, etc. - so there's no telling what I'll finish first.

My goals for the year (as tracked in the sidebar of my journal) for reading will be to 1) finish the entirety of Remembrance of Things Past (need to buy "The Sweet Cheat Gone" and "Time Regained" though) and 2) to read 40 books. Thanks to the Proust, the other 37 books are likely to be somewhat light, but I've got four Charlaine Harris books waiting for me and every intention of buying the ones I didn't get before, so I've got a head start in that direction! Who'd think I'd develop a taste for fluffy detective novels?

So I just lent Ellen Kushner's The Privelege of the Sword to my boss's boss. "Just to let you know," I said, "the side lead character is a gay swordsman."

"Oh," he replies in his gravelly, also-ill voice,"You mean he's a ... gay blade?"

Ba-dum BUMP!

And then I say, "Well, yeah, but it's cool, he's really a bad-ass ..."

Big Kahuna: "You'd better just stop there before you get yourself into any more trouble."

I feel a little swimming now that I'm in, but, well, mostly I'm just going to sit here until lunch. I wouldn't have come in at all but there's a secret Santa thing going on and I just couldn't bear the thought of the person I had been assigned going to the dinner and getting no present. (Seriously. This is why I came in.) I also had to get my goose, which is paid for, from the butcher, and cancel the order for hors d'ouvres for the party tonight.

As it's the end of the year, I'm trying to get a few more books read so I can "boost my numbers" for the year. I'm at 33 or so right now (I've just realized I've missed a few books), and I'd like to get over last year's total of 34. I think I can, I think I can!

LATER: Turns out I've already read 35, YAY! Shame on me for not keeping better track, but still, let's see if I can finish two more books before the year is out.

PS: No phone today. Please email.

I've been working on this great series by Kage Baker for about ... lord, has it been seven years now? I can remember walking down First Avenue South in Seattle, under warm sunshine, so entranced in The Garden of Iden I didn't want to stop reading it even for a little while. I must have been working at Acadio, and since we moved to the 1st So. location after the fall of 2000 ... I'm guessing it was early spring. Okay, it was 2001, and it has been only six years since I started the series. At any rate, it's been some really great reading, and the final volume, The Sons of Heaven, came out over the summer, and my brother brought it and the previous volume (The Machine's Child) over for me when he came to visit. And, well, I need to get them both finished so shadowdaddy could mail them on to thewronghands, as she's started the series and, er, with eight books total, I don't think anyone else is going to get as far as the last two, and why not give them to someone who will enjoy them as I no longer wish to keep books I won't read a second time, especially big space sucking hardbacks.

At any rate, it's done. Sadly, the series lost its forward impetus probably around book three, and most of the recent books have read as filler (especially since three or so of them were actually just short story collection, curse me for a fool for paying hardback prices for them). But I still wanted to finish it as I've spent years wondering just what it was that happened at the end of history. I suspect Baker was making it up way back in 1997 when she first published Iden - she didn't know who Dr. Zeus was going to be and didn't know how history would end. But I know, now. And may I be so fortunate as to never have to buy books in hardback again, and may I never be in the unfortunate position of having to wait for a long tale to finish being told by an author who's still writing the series!

Thankfully, Marcel is long dead, and thus, this morning, we did meet again, parting on page 272 of Sodom and Gomorrah (he's on the train going to a little social gathering composed of, as near as I can tell, a bunch of rejects and nincompoops). I'm looking forward to getting back in the groove, though, truth be told, I'd sure love to be reading some books that don't weigh as much as a laptop.

Proust is at page 176 (Sodom and Gomorrah). He's in Balbec (St. Malo) right now, moping about his grandmother being dead. Reading it makes me miss my grandmother, but I wasn't a self-absorbed jerk like he was when she died so I didn't just get hit with it a year later. I'd put in a quote from the book only as I'm at work I must be brief - just ramping up for the day and I've been distracted by getting a "your mailbox is over its size limit" email.

Also, I discovered last night that I've been toting around a copy of The Eyre Affair for a while now - a pretty, American trade paperback. That said, I'd really like to get my hands on Volume 2 as I'm in dire need of a bit of light reading to counterbalance the Proust. Does anyone out there have Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde?

Well! I just managed to finish The Devil in Amber, Mark Gatiss's second Lucifer Box novel. That was fun, if fluffy. Anyone want to borrow it? I've also got my copy of The Curious Incident blah blah blah if anyone wants to read that.

And now: on to Sodom and Gomorrah! I anticipate starting reading it this very night, on the train. I feel like a nut, but I'm excited about it!

How good was Pilates on the Reformer yesterday? So good that I woke up in the middle of the night and could barely raise my arms above my ribcage. They are sore today. I see all of my fat converting into muscle in no time. If only I'd got rid of more of the fat first! I'm going to have rower's arms at this rate.

As it turns out, the National did sell the last of its allocation of Masque of the Red Death tickets last night. However ... there are tickets still available at the Battersea Arts Centre. I'm going on the 30th with W and J and butterbee and bathtubgin, aiming for 7:15. If you want to go to this or another date, I'd say call them NOW and get your tickets bought.

In other news I've fallen in love with the Italian bakery/coffee shop/bar across the street and have been going about twice a day. The ham and cheese croissant, it's just the thing after the five flights of stairs I went up on my way into work today after being lied to about what platform the next train was leaving from twice and then trying to make up lost time (Proustian pun here?) leaping up the escalator at Holborn. And it's only £1.25. And they have free snacks at happy hour.

And The Eyre Affair, it's hysterical, great for lit fans and English grammar nuts AND alternate history buffs. (itsjustaname, I think you'd love it, would you like it next? And irrationalrobot, you should suggest this one for science fiction book club.) I realized I'm now going to have read three mystery-like novels in a month - The Curious Incident, the new Lucifer Box novel, and this. Whatever is happening to my taste in books? Are Dick Frances and Miss Marple my future?

The show was fun if unevenly acted and struggling a bit (in my mind) with having a "message" to deliver. The audience was divided into four different groups, each getting slightly different pieces of the intertwining storylines; we were "red," which meant we got the girl with the "gwai lou" (foreign devil was my read) boyfriend and the exciting mugging/drug deal scene - but I think I might have preferred the "little girl looking for her lost toy" thread or the "young hip Chinese teens" group. (It's sold out but returns may be available just before the show; call and ask if you want to go.)

Of course, it was chilly outside and not really a good night for sitting quietly in a patio for some outdoor theater, especially when it started to rain, but that's how it goes sometimes. I put my gym shirt on under my sweater and shadowdaddy was nice and lent me his coat. Afterwards we went out for some uninspired Chinese food (the girl from Sichuan province and her date from Taiwan both recommended some other restaurants to us with better food), and now we're at home, sitting in front of a fire and thawing out. You read me right, a fire: the gas inspectors came by today and showed shadowdaddy how to light this apparently non-decorative bit of living room tat. Just you watch our gas bills skyrocket. And, of course, we'll never want to move now.

Oh, and I finished The Guermantes Way - I am so proud of myself! Of course, it was good so it wasn't like finishing broccoli or anything. I bet I can finish The Curious Incident by Friday, too.

It looks like I'll be finishing the month with a Triple Toe Loop! Triple Salchow! as both Curious Incident and Guermantes Way are WELL on their way to being finished by Monday. Proust is at page 580, which is very exciting as I have been working FOREVER on this "Read Remembrance" project (though in fact it only started last October), and, well, Curious Incident is a total cheater book as about a quarter of it is white space and there are many pictures. (In Proust, Our Hero got into a fight with a rather psychotic man last night, and has just now run into the character who was the protagonist of Volume 2, Swann). But since I'm REALLY trying to read more than I did last year and my goal is to finish two books a month, I'm quite pleased that I'm actually getting up in the threes for September.

Otherwise: a quiet night, had wechsler over and tried some lamb from the good butcher across the street from work again, a different preparation this time (but also easy) involving chopped onion, vinegar, oil, a parsley leaf, and salt and pepper, which made a marinade the lamb sat in for an hour before being pan-fried. It was delicious again but I had a hard time getting the pan frying right; the first time it was just too rare. I also made brushetta, using a recipe (like the marinade) from the Silver Spoon. The kicker was that you toast the bread on both sides in the oven, then brush a garlic clove across both sides and put it back in for toasting before putting the chopped tomatoes (and basil and olive oil) on the bread. Yes, this cookbook is rocking mightily right now.

Tomorrow: Moonwalk in Chinatown, which is now quite sold out. Tonight: bed! Night, all.