Browsing the Bookshelves

I'm still working on my new website,  Reading Books. So far, the best thing about this site is it's rather cool URL. For the rest, I seem to have struck an impasse. While I find it useful to keep track of my books and reading history, quite frankly, the site is dull, dull, dull and did I mention boring. I need inspiration!  A started out with a really clear idea of what I wanted to to, but those grand schemes seem to have desserted when faced with html challenges. The result is a dull, dull, dull (did I mention boring?) site which looks like it's out of the box frontpage, which is exactly what it is.

I've got sections on wants, wish lists, reading diaries, etc, but they are just not firing.

Another sad case of needing help. I'll sleep on it.

Sundays are rapidly becoming my favourite day of week - a long way from the days of childhood when I used to hate Sundays. My mother was always in a bad mood, struggling to do the washing, the housework and all her marking and lesson preparation for the following week! But no Sundays seem a day of pure luxury - and often the only time that Rod and I get the chance to do things together just for the fun of it.

This afternoon we took ourselves off to Crystal Palace Park to see for ourselves just how much of that magnificant momument to victorian confidence could be detect. In fact, I was surprised how much there was too see. I knew that nothing of the building itself remains (it was burnt down in 1936 and its water towers, which survived the fire, were demolished during the second world war as it was feared that they would provide signposts to London to German bombers). But much of the layout of the garden terraces remains, enough to give clear visual clues to the sheer granduer of the place.

There's a small musuem at the top of the park, detailing the history of the building and some of the people assoicated with it - Joseph Paxton and Owen Jones to name but two.  After a browse around the displays - an a demonstration of sheer willpower on my part by leaving the gift shop without buying anything, not even a book - we spent an hour or so strolling around the park. It is full of oddities - single remaining statutes, an incongruous concert venue, the huge BBC transmitter, almost wild woodland areas, and a major sports stadium slap in the middle. Behind the stadium, at the lower end of the park, is the famous Dinosaur trial, and might weird it is too. Intended by the builder's of Crystal Palace as the world's very first theme park on prehistoric lines, it contains life size reconstructions of dinosaurs - many now over 150 years old - which sort of take you by surprise as you round at corner.

I'm not quite sure the park works. It seems as though no-one has really thought about why it is there and what it should offer to visitors and local residents, leaving the impression that it is a hodge-podge of ill-thought out good ideas. It is, in parts, quite beautiful, and well worth a visit if even for the romance of the The Crystal Palace itself.

Someone else's blog said:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

Here goes: this is the fifth sentence from page 123 of the closest book.

"Here, however, the horses and the charioteer, at least, appear in lateral view, as they were already represented in the more advanced Mediterranean civilisations, eg , in the battle scene relief on this funerary stele from Mycenae"

Anyone want to take a guess at the book?

I can't decide what to read next. I've started The Waves, and started Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and started The Mystery of the Princes by Audrey Williamson, but I don't seem to be in the mood for any of these. Help! I need suggestions. This have never happened to me before.

You can see my "too be read" pile here. What should I go for?

to the wonderful people who work in the NHS. I had a hospital visit today and thanks to their kind care and attention all went well.

So, after an uplifting visit to the hospital I celebrated by going shopping (how else). I was prevented fronm spending too much money as my time was limited and much of what time I did have was taken up by a market researcher who wanted to know all about what I thought of TV adverts for mobile companies - adverts that I don't recall seeing for companies I don't think I've ever heard of. I tried to explain that I didn't think I could help them much but in the end it seemed easier just to answer the questions as best I could. If I'd known it was going to take 30 minutes or so, I'd have accepted their offer of a cup of tea!

And of course, a trip to the shopping centre is the ideal opportunity to release a few books, so you can expect to find surprise packages dotted around Bromley High Street!

...to post sensibly. Had a lovely evening at our monthly reading group - great company, good food and a fine discussion of Marc Behm's twin novels, Eye of the Beholder and Afraid to Death.

Came home to finish reading (re-reading actually, although it must be near 20 years ago) Josephine Tey's tantalising Daughter of Time.  During the process of cataloguing my books a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find that I didn't have a copy of this book - I must have read my father's originally - so I ordered one. Several of Josephine Tey's books have been re-issued recently, including this one, so luckily it was in print. I was rather to surprised to find that the new edition does not include a picture of the portrait of Richard III which is the central prop for the novel.  If you are thinking of reading this, go for the older edition - or be prepared for a trip to the National Portrait  Gallery.

Dragged darling husband out this afternoon, despite his protestations of tireness and the poor weather, to Dulwich Picture to seel the excellent exhibition on the life and works of Beatrix Potter. Who doesn't remember Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin as childhood friends? But there's so much more to Potter's work - her scientific observations and marvelous natural history and botanical drawings. I had no idea she was a Londoner born and bred, always having assumed that she was from the Lake District, where so many of her pictures take their inspiration from. Apparently the Lake District was just a frequent holiday destination.

Rod ended up enjoying the presentations and even confessed later that he was glad to have gone (possibly aided by his discovery that we didn't have to pay to get in as we're both Friends of the Gallery anyway!).

I thoroughly recommend a visit to the exhibition. It's not huge, so only takes an hour or so, and it's a wonderful way to spend and otherwise cold, dull and depressing Sunday afternoon. You'll have to be quick thought, the exhibition closes on 22nd January.

As if I didn't have enough things I'm meant to do, I've started building a new website today, called Reading Books. It's going to be about books, my books, buying books and bookcrossing of course. I'm also hoping to put up a few pages about literary London, after stumbling across an incredibly disappointing book which claimed to be a book lover's guide to London. It was more like a business directory!  I jotted down a few notes on what I really thought of the book here.

I've also spent a little time updating my library on LibraryThing.

I had  strange day today - and one which I would not care to repeat. A quiet morning, followed my the usual trip to the warehouse - and then thought I'd stop off in Dulwich Park to release a few books.  The park was strangely quiet. I don't mean that there weren't many people there - there were, the place was almost a busy as on the sunniest Sunday in July, but all those people seemed to be making very little noise. Even the children were quiet.

Later in the day, I popped down the road to leave a book on my favourite bench, only to find that there was a bookcrossing book there already! It was one I had registered and released almost three months ago. Someone must have taken it and then brought it back. They'd even kept the special waterproof bag!  Unfortunately no journal entry though.

But the real down came when I got back home. My wedding ring came off as I was shaking my hands warm. I searched and searched to no avail. Rod and I spent almost an hour ploughing through the contents of bins in case it had fallen in, moving boxes in case it had slipped behind, and shoving furniture to look underneath. My knees ached after peering through the cracks in the floor boards with a bright torch to see if it had slipped through. I'm quite surprised just how upset I was about losing it. I'm not known as emotional, and Rod is Mr Philosophical himself, but I can tell you I was close to tears when the thing finally turned up, neating tucked between two books! Of course it would be.