I just finished rereading Jamyang Norbu's Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years, aka The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. (I set myself a reading goal of 52 books this year, hence the title of this post; although, considering it's already September, I don't think I'm going to complete the challenge this year.) I read it twenty years ago when it was first published, and reread it now since one of my students is doing her dissertation on it. It's about Holmes's post-Reichenbach time in Tibet from when he's pretending to be dead in the gap between "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House".

Some of it didn't stand up well to a second read, but THE END, THE END! Pretty much every review I've read of Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire says that you ~must read it, if only for the very last page, and I have to say the same of Norbu's Holmes. If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, whether ACD or Granada or BBC or whichever version, read this book for the last few lines. (It's a bit like the very last scene of An Adventure in Space and Time for Doctor Who fans.)

Re fandom things, I'm pretty disappointed that neither of my recipients for the last two exchanges I participated in responded to their gifts. Oh, well. I did manage an spn_masquerade fill, and I enjoyed writing it, so that's something.

Also also, yuletide nominations are open!

Hope everyone is doing well. <3 LLAP!

As anticipated, my students arrived for the new semester and promptly ate my brain, leaving me with little to no mindspace for anything else. In addition to my usual duties, I'm now the head of the English Honours BA programme (not at all as good as it sounds) and in charge of not one but five student clubs (theatre, poetry, writing, research, and gender studies). Good times. No, really. Having so much to do means I have much less time to dwell on other things.

Anyway, so one of my writing club students gave me a book of Terribly Tiny Tales to read, so I decided to cheat on the book meme a bit and post about it for question #2 on the list, "best bargain", because hey, a book I paid no money for counts as a bargain, right? Right. I haven't finished it yet, but here's one of my favourites:

( a terribly tiny tale )

Took me a moment to 'get' it, but when I did, I loved it.

Also, I'm offering an optional course in Fandom Studies this semester. More on that next time, I hope.

<3

Such an unforgettable film.

My heart just shattered when I realised the significance of the name he'd given his machine. All the tears for Alan Turing.



In book news, I'm almost done with the Captive Prince trilogy. Good while it's lasted, but romance is so not my genre. I do love Laurent's character, though.

A very happy birthday to analineblue! I hope you have a lovely day. <3

In academia land, this morning I reached what I thought was my office and found, to my horror, that a picture of a saint had been pasted on the door. Then I looked up and saw that the name above the door wasn't mine; I'd gotten off the lift on the wrong floor. Phew.

The last two books I read won't need much time to review, haha. Flipped: this is the very last time I let my students talk me into reading teenage heterosexual romance! I did love the central idea of seeing things from a different perspective.

I suspect The Strange Library is to Murakami what Haroun and the Sea of Stories is to Rushdie: a quirky, potentially magical but ultimately disappointing tale. Not recommended, unless you have 45 minutes to kill on a book that has more pictures than text.

The best for last: Vikram Chandra's gorgeous, gorgeous Love and Longing in Bombay. I have five more pages to read, but will leave them for after work so that I can savour them. The end of the book also has a few pages from the beginning of Sacred Games, since the protagonist of that book is introduced in one of the five stories in Love and Longing. One of the five is a gut-wrenching story about a gay relationship, and I won't write about it just now because it deserves a re-read and serious reflection. But here's a bit from the last story, magic realism at its best that's worthy of Marquez himself. This is after news of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki reaches a tiny village:

( Read more... )

At work, trying to eat lunch while simultaneously typing this without getting food all over the keyboard, but I have to do a books update before I start forgetting what I've read, so:

- The Cursed Child! Scorpius is adorable, and his bromance with Albus is just ridiculous. <3 How are they not a couple by the end? Time travel is the best, and I loved all the timey-wimey stuff. Then Snape appeared and I kind of lost it and read through the rest through a haze of snot-nosed nostalgia. I don't think I'm going to write a detailed review of it, but I'm happy to talk about it if anyone wants to!

- Yesterday, I spent the whole evening reading: rare and so so enjoyable. I finished Breathing in Colour, a book about a British woman (Alida) who comes to India in search of her lost teenaged daughter (Mia). The reason I bought the book years ago (apart from the fact that it was on sale at a huge discount) was that the daughter is a synaesthete, and I've been interested in synaesthesia ever since I discovered Keats. Parts of it are a bit strange. The author clearly knows a lot about the tourist spots in India, but the descriptions play up the 'exotic' element a little too much, and sometimes the trauma Alida is feeling -- because of not just Mia but also a past tragedy, which is revealed to us in bits and pieces -- is just badly written. But the descriptions of Mia's experiences as her senses merge into each other are pretty decent. Mia's younger sister Kizzy drowns in the bathtub as a baby, and we're left wondering until the end of the book if Mia, who'd been terribly jealous of the new baby, was responsible for Kizzy's death.

- After 'Breathing,' I started and finished 84, Charing Cross Road. Which completely broke my heart. It won't take you more than a couple of hours to read, and it's so worth it. Is there anything better than a book about books? Answer: it's a book that has letters about books written to each other by real people over the course of multiple decades. The wonderfully rude Helene Hanff is an American writer who orders books from Marks & Co, a British bookshop, and corresponds with many of its employees and their extended families, most notably Frank Doel, the chief buyer. I was left wondering what happened to some of the people the others lost touch with; will have to read the next book, in which Hanff describes what happened when she finally got to visit England. For those interested, here are Goodreads' lists of Books about Books and Books about Bookstores.

- Re The Book Thief, which I mentioned last time that I was loving, I watched the film after finishing the book. Both are gorgeous, but they're also relentlessly tragic.

- Now reading: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which is a quietly beautiful book about the friendship between a Chinese-American boy and a Japanese-American girl during the 1940s, at a time when people of Japanese origin are being forcibly sent to internment camps. The story begins in the present time from Henry's point of view, and I guess I'll find out soon enough what happened to Keiko in the past. Fingers crossed.

- I've read a couple of lovely Femme Remix fics, so, in the spirit of enjoying fannish things and passing on the joy, here's a rec: Behind Layers, Minerva McGonagall/Poppy Pomfrey. There are a couple more but I'm out of time now, so I'll save them for next time.

LLAP. ♥