Week In Review: November 2005, 1

6 Nov

Reading:

  • a few chapters in Kate Fox’s Watching the English
  • the prologue and first part of Pierre Bourdieu’s Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
  • started with Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy
  • Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

They are all non-fiction books, because Jo Beverley’s novel The Shattered Rose still didn’t arrive and I somehow wasn’t in the mood for another novel. I added Jessica Benson’s Lord Stanhope’s Proposal to the order to make up for that. They both shall arrive tomorrow.

Gaming:

  • finished Dink Smallwood, a freeware game
  • started many games of Civilization III on Deity difficulty. I’m really unlucky regarding my starting locations. Most of the times they’re dry and don’t have a food bonus – and that’s something I really want to even think about playing on. So new start. If I’m somehow lucky enough to have an acceptable start, it’s pretty sure that I’ll have two aggressive neighbours only a few tiles away – and that’s too near to feel comfortable. So new start again. Why must I always be in the middle of AI’s whereas other AIs have a whole continent to themselves?

Music:
Last week I read a long article about Kate Bush (she released a new CD). Some days ago I then remembered that I liked her song Running up that Hill and searched our CDs – I was not sure if we had it. We didn’t, but we had the LP Hounds of Love and I found her Wuthering Heights somewhere, too. So I played Running up that Hill quite often, the LP and Wuthering Heights a few times (it no longer irritates me like it used to). The result of all this was that The Boyfriend bought me the CD version of Hounds of Love so that I could put the song on repeat and I didn’t need to get up all the time when I wanted to hear it again. Well that, and because I didn’t scratch the LP …

“Connections”:
On Kate Bush’s CD Hounds of Love is a quote from Alfred Tennyson’s The Coming of Arthur:

“Wave after wave, each mightier than the last
‘Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame”

I liked it and – probably because it reminded me of something else (see below) – I went looking for it: Norton Anthology: English Literature, Volume 2, but no luck. I’ll look for it on the Internet next week. But leafing through the anthology, I saw Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I read it this afternoon and discovered that reading it is not the best move when you want to write later.
“Something else”: the wave in the quote reminded me of the PS2 game series .hack and that I still need to get Mia back in the last one.

What I didn’t do this week:

  • write two reviews: Trudi Canavan – The Magicians’ Guild: The Black Magician Trilogy, Book 1 and Jacqueline Carey – Banewreaker: Volume 1 of “The Sundering”.
  • played Disgaea

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