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It appears I still have the Great Virus. The One that Never Goes Away. I don't have it as badly as I did, but it still demands I sleep much and it still ensures I don't quite ever catch up with things. The good thing is that I've not fallen behind. I never quite catch up, and I don't pull ahead the way I had intended around now, but I meet the essential deadlines. In fact, given that I'm teaching, keeping up with the doctorate and keeping up with my promised articles, I'm doing better than I was this time last year, despite the virus.

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I'm playing with a bookshop's website (it being National Bookshop Day in Australia and there being code I could play with) so you get a picture (you can click through to the site if you want, but mostly, it's about the picture):

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I've finished the book by Dave Freer I took into class last week and am now reading Sue Bradbury's Joanna, George and Henry in the interstices of feeling tired and working on bibliography. I'm hoping that this (and the remainder of the day) will see maybe ten books able to go away rather than sitting in piles in my lounge room. I know - this is a wild and vain desire, but it's mine and I shall achieve it.

My first six books to go away may possibly include some reading en passant, simply because they are the books they are. There are passages and thoughts and memories. These six (since I'm into naming today) are:
Andree Courtemanche's La richesse des femmes
Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer
Elizabeth Chadwick's The Greatest Knight
Felicity Pulman's Rosemary for Remembrance
Henry Treece's The Children's Crusade
and Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (which I'm always tempted to read with Fr Boyle's review, simply because Leonard Boyle was one of the nicest people I ever met and wrote such an I-hate-this-review)

ETA: Five books away! Not properly away, merely in piles elsewhere, but still, five books! More floor and a chair might emerge, one day, from the bookstacks...

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Freer's Cuttlefish got me thinking about submarine books I know and love and that none of them are by women. They all feature female characters, and Peter Dickinson Emma Tupper's Diary is one of my all-time favourite novels, but they're all by men. I must be missing something. Or some book.

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I ought to be doing something about dinner, but I can't seem to get started. I got out the salsa that I shall cook chicken strips in, but I was distracted by many, many small wrapped chocolates I didn't know I had. Somehow they were hidden amongst the pasta, rather than with the rest of the chocolate. I'm not eating them - just admiring them. Eventually I'll find one of my small pans and cook that chook, but until then, I shall witter and wander and ponder and add bits and pieces to my current bibliography.

I've hidden the chocolate underneath the pasta again, for I think I might have a use for it (and I've checked its used-by date, and it's fine).

My kitchen pantry does this to me from time to time. It has hidden sectors and can produce the most amazing surprises. Just a few weeks ago nearly 6 litres of home made cherry liqueur materialised, mysteriously, after all.

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It was National Bookshop Day here and, since obviously today was mostly a day of bedrest and annoying friends online, I went to an online bookshop. Four books will be in the mail to me on Monday. One has pictures of canals, one is something JRRTish and the other two will be a surprise to me for I can't remember what I chose. I really do have that virus back, don't I? Imagine forgetting books!

Seven books are no longer stacked near my desk and are in their end-room stacks for final putting-away another day. Only three more today and I shall feel a sense of conscious virtue. This means I need to read about 700 pages. Oh, how sad...I may have to stop working on bibliography for a few hours. (I also need to work on my crocodile tears - they're just not effective.)


ETA: Interesting typos are now corrected. We're in the middle of a small weather shift and my eyes are a bit funky. Only a little, though, which means I didn't notice.