the books of 2003

My, I've been a bookworm.

( the whole list )

Favourites: Lanark (combines reality and fantasy and does them both brilliantly. Wise and unsettling and utterly riveting. Book of the year by a long shot). Honourable mentions: Life of Pi, Everything is Illuminated, Riddley Walker, The Secret History, Anthropology, Birthday Letters
Least favourites: This is harder for books, since if I hate a book I don't usually persevere to the end. But see 'most disappointing'. Oh, there is one: Happiness(tm) wanted to be clever, but felt like several hundred tired old urban myths and email forwards dumped in a blender.
Funniest: Thinks..., Behind the Scenes at the Museum (in a black, blitz-humour sort of way), Everything is Illuminated (when it wasn't being tragic), bits of Parachutes & Kisses.
Most disappointing: Atonement, The Biographer's Tale (both by authors whose other books I'd enjoyed, neither of these did anything for me at all).
Weirdness award: Possibly Riddley Walker, which is in post-apocalyptic mangled English and may remove your ability to spell. Or Anthropology, a hundred hundred-word stories about a hundred peculiar girlfriends.

the sap is rising

After spending December doing nothing (well, more coughing than I would have liked, but not much else) I am suddenly all a-flutter about art and crafts. Seriously, I need eight hands, Kali-style. At this moment, one hand would be leafing through a decoupage book, another would be snipping away with a cuticle scissors until the air was full of confetti-like bits, another on the mouse looking for information on book-binding, another stirring a pot of hot wax while its neighbour poured more hot wax into a candle mould... you get the idea.

My main worry is that I'll be so flustered by all the options that I'll end up doing none of them.

It's at least partly my old art teacher Mary's fault. Mum and I went to see her when I was home. I hadn't seen her for at least ten years. She was everything an art teacher should be, eccentric and theatrical and fond of odd tangents (she liked to rant about standing stones). She used to paint huge, gorgeous sheela-na-gig figures blending into landscapes. One of them hung in her classroom. Stepping into her sittingroom at Christmas, I met it again, taking up the whole wall facing me. When I'd picked myself up off the floor and finished being overwhelmed by enthusiastic hugs, I found myself blathering about calligraphy and Blake and the craft stuff I'd been doing, and Mary was encouraging me to get a market stall ('it's how I started') and telling me that Pauline Bewick did all her art in a caravan so pooh to my complaints of not having a workshop, and then producing presents as if she'd been expecting me, a moonstone pendant and a handmade candle in the only colour they'd been sold out of at Watkins the previous week.

I went away with my head buzzing. I think she applied some sort of metaphysical jumpleads to my brain.

I mostly just want to make stuff for the fun of it. But I do wonder how practical it would be to rent a market stall for a day somewhere. I've been doing some web searching, and it seems markets only get mentioned on the web when they're in danger of being replaced with glass office-blocks. Ho hum.

(If anyone's ever sold stuff this way, or knows someone who has, please do shout out.)

Now it's quarter to one and I'm wide awake. I don't have work till the afternoon tomorrow. It would be very silly indeed to put a pot of wax on to heat up at this stage of the evening. But when has that ever stopped me before?

"you've been chosen as an extra in the sequel to your life"

This was oddly amusing:

( lemming wheee! )