Lady Audley's Secret - Mary Elizabeth Braddon

I first read this book back in my undergraduate days. I went through a big Wilkie Collins phase after studying The Woman in White for first year English, and so I took to loitering around the 823.8 section of the university library to see what else I could dig up of a similar ilk. Obviously, Braddon and Collins weren't far apart on the shelves. Plus, one of the Wilkie Collins books I read included an "if you like this, try _____" section at the back. This was one of the books listed.

I remember at the time thinking that it didn't really compare to Collins' writing, and I was probably right. Mary Elizabeth Braddon isn't QUITE in the same class as Wilkie Collins. But despite being the lesser writer of the two, she still manages to spin one HELL of a story.

Lady Audley's Secret revolves around Robert Audley, a young barrister. Accompanied by his friend George, he pays a visit to his uncle, who's recently married a much younger woman. When George disappears mysteriously shortly thereafter - with a trail of clues leading to suggest that he may have returned to the Australian goldfields - Robert gets it into his head that his new aunt is involved.

So he takes it upon himself to start investigating Lady Audley's past. He rapidly discovers that things don't entirely add up, especially when he takes into consideration the circumstances of George's disappearance and the fact that George left without leaving any plans in place for his young son. As the story progresses, Robert finds himself in an increasingly dangerous quest for the truth.

I really enjoyed this book. It was definitely a page turner as far as I was concerned, full of great characters and exciting adventures. Sure, Lady Audley's secret turns out to be a little bit of an anticlimax. But Lady Audley herself is a fabulous and incredibly conniving character, who'd probably be classified as a sociopath in the modern world. And I honestly can't work out if I think her fate was well deserved or not.

On the whole, it was a very enjoyable and occasionally creepy mystery, and I'd definitely recommend checking it out, especially if you like Wilkie Collins' writing.

Have you read it? What did you think??

K xx

Middlemarch - George Eliot

I have a confession to make: I got this book as a present for my seventeenth birthday. It's taken me fifteen years to get around to reading it. Why? Because I had to read The Mill on the Floss for first year university fourteen years ago, and it was non-stop struggle street for me. Essentially, it put me off reading George Eliot for a really long time.

So when I was putting together my Classics Club list, I figured I may as well put this one on the list and see if I could get over my preconceived notions about George Eliot.

I...had mixed feelings about this book. It's essentially the story of a town's worth of inhabitants. The story starts with one or two major characters, then moves on to focus on a couple of characters who appeared as minor characters in the previous section etc etc.

As a general rule, I struggle with stories that jump around between a lot of characters. I had the same feelings about Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Hell, I even felt that way about Game of Thrones. And it's not because any of those books were bad (although personally, I thought Game of Thrones was decidedly mediocre). It's just that they jumped around so much that I found it difficult to keep all the different threads of the story straight in my head, and I struggled with the sections dealing with characters that I didn't especially care for.

What I liked most about Middlemarch was that the characters weren't perfect. And I'm not talking flawed in the way that Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are flawed where you can't help but love them. In Middlemarch, the characters are deeply flawed. They don't always get happily ever afters. They rush into marriage and then discover that their new spouse isn't the person they thought. They stand back and let people die. They hold grudges, they screw up, they're vindictive, they're petty.

And all of that was great. They were actual human characters leading actual human lives. But there were a lot of characters that I just didn't particularly care about. Either I didn't find them interesting or their stories dragged on and on without any real progress for hundreds of pages, and then all of a sudden things would be wrapped up in a neat little package with two pages to spare.

Really, I think the problem here was me more than the book. It was long and often dry, and there were times when I felt like I was reading page after page without making any real progress. The characters that I liked were enough to get this a three star rating from me. But I definitely didn't have the five star "OMG AMAZING" experience that so many others seem to have had. Which, frankly, makes me a little bit sad.

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

The Odyssey - Homer

Source

Another month, another Classics Club book crossed off the list! I stumbled into this one by virtue of a trip to collect Ness from hospital. It was meant to just be a quick grab-her-stuff-and-go trip, so I didn't take my Kindle with me. But then two of her doctors decided that a third doctor needed to give the okay before she could leave, which meant that we ended up sitting around waiting from about 11am until around 4.45pm for said doctor to turn up. (Which he still didn't do - Ness ended up circumventing the system and phoning his secretary, who phoned said doctor in surgery, who phoned the nurses' station and said that Ness could go)

Anyway, Ness happened to have The Odyssey in her bag, so when I came back from grabbing some lunch and she was taking a nap, I figured I may as well do some reading. And somehow, "some reading" turned into 250 pages. And obviously, I ended up pilfering it from her so that I could finish it.

It wasn't what I was expecting. For some reason, I'd always thought that The Iliad was the story of the Trojan War and The Odyssey was the story of Odysseus getting home from Troy. But it was more like equal parts what happened in Ithaca while he was away, what happened on his journey home, and what happened when he REACHED home. I had to translate small, basic chunks of it when I did Ancient Greek in first year uni and it always struck me as enormously dull. But I ended up really enjoying it.

I struggled a little at first because the edition I was reading used direct translations of the Greek names, rather than the Anglicised spellings I expected, so it took me a little while to get used to seeing Circe written as Kirke, or Klytemnaistra instead of Clytemnestra, or Akhilleus instead of Achilles. But once I got used to that, it flowed nicely and was pretty easy reading.

The biggest problem for me is that Odysseus is kind of a douchebag a lot of the time. I mean, the guy comes home after 20 years away, and then spends a bunch of time lurking around in disguise to ascertain whether his wife has been faithful to him. Which, gross. And it's not just his wife. He lurks around in disguise to establish how his son feels, how his father feels, how his servants feel. And then he's all "SURPRISE, IT'S ME!!!". Dick move, Odysseus. Dick move.

BUT. Despite Odysseus' asshattery and some "Wait, is this person who I think they are?" issues over spellings and a few repetitive phrases (I swear, if I read about Dawn's rosy fingers stretching over the horizon one more time, I was going to scream), I found myself really enjoying it. There are stories in there that everyone knows in some form or another - the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs. Stories that remain compelling and fascinating thousands of years after they were first told. There's a reason these stories are classics, there really is.

Have you read The Odyssey? What did you think?

K xx

She - H. Rider Haggard

Not the edition I read, sadly. Source.

I first read She in 2002, for a university subject titled "Archaeology in Film and Literature" (yes, the subject WAS the most awesome thing of ever, because I got to watch Indiana Jones and The Mummy for credit). It led me into a serious H. Rider Haggard jaunt, where I ploughed through all the Haggard books my university library had fairly quickly. I remembered enjoying this a lot and, given that it was basically the start of the "lost world" sub-genre, it seemed only appropriate that I add it to my Classics Club list.

Plot Summary:
Cambridge professor Horace Holly is surprised when a friend of his turns up, hands over a mysterious box and custody of his five year old son, Leo, and then promptly dies. Twenty years later, Leo - who's now smoking hot - opens the box to find that it contains an ancient piece of pottery and numerous documents, indicating that he's descended from an old Greek dude named Kallikrates, who was killed by a mysterious white queen in deepest Africa. On the pottery sherd, Kallikrates' wife, the Egyptian princess Amenartas, demands that her son and/or his descendants seek revenge.

So Holly and Leo set off for Africa with their trusty servant, Job. They get shipwrecked, contract malaria, and nearly get eaten by cannibals, but eventually they make it to the queen's home, near the ruined city of Kôr, which predates ancient Egypt by several thousand years. There, they meet Queen Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, who claims to have the secret of immortality (she's over 2000 years old) and who promptly falls in love with Leo, who's apparently a dead ringer for Kallikrates. Shenanigans ensue.

Thoughts:
Oy. This was kind of rough. The story took a long time to get going, partly due to the fact that the part where Leo's going through all the documents is filled with slabs of Greek and Latin and Medieval English. Much of the dialogue once they arrive in Africa is meant to take place in an antiquated form of Arabic, and is therefore written thusly: "blame me not if thou dost wear away thy little span with such a sick pain at the heart that thou wouldst fain have died before ever thy curious eyes were set upon me." (p. 144 in the crappy, independently published "YAY THIS IS OUT OF COPYRIGHT" edition that my library had)

So that made it quite difficult to get into the story because it was constantly flicking between nineteenth century English (for Holly's observations) and something resembling Shakespearean English for the dialogue. As a result, my brain struggled to keep up, and I found myself unable to read more than 25-30 pages at a time before my eyes started to glaze over.

It's really hard to read this type of book in the twenty first century without constant headdesking over the Victorian ideas about women and race. Here, the Amahagger people over whom Ayesha rules are billed as uneducated, cannibalistic savages who practice animal sacrifice. It's billed as a matriarchal society, but then we're told that every decade or so, the men rise up and kill off all the older women to put them back in their place again. Ayesha rules over them because she's white and educated, but even then, a lot of her ideas are billed as "the noble savage"-esque.

In Kôr, we're given a lost African civilisation, which YAY! But Ayesha shows Holly the catacombs of Kôr's citizens, and they're all white (Their perfectly preserved 4000 year old corpses also make excellent fire starters, apparently). Obviously, the idea of a lost civilisation that was highly educated AND populated by people of colour was too much for Victorian sensibilities to handle...

Ayesha's an interesting character. She's a woman in a position of power who's not afraid to use her beauty to convince men to do her bidding. Even Holly, who happily proclaims himself a misogynist, falls under her charms when he sees her face. But on the other hand, she's obsessed with the idea of her "lost love", despite the fact that Kallikrates chose his wife over Ayesha, and she killed him for it. It's her way or the highway - anyone who displeases her is rapidly put to death, and she considers all her subjects to effectively be primitive slaves. She uses her beauty as a weapon, and ultimately it betrays her.

Headdesking aside (because let's be honest - if we discounted books based on the attitudes of the times in which they were written, there would be an awful lot of classic books deemed not worth reading), the last 50-odd pages were pretty exciting stuff. Yes, it was still a little slow but FAR more thrilling than the book's early stages.

On the whole, it wasn't nearly as action packed as I remembered it being, and I can't help but feel like it would have been a lot more enjoyable if the dialogue hadn't been so formal and stilted a lot of the time...

Have you read it? What did you think?

K xx

Things they don't teach you in library school

So you guys know that I finished my Masters in library stuff last year. Over the past few months of working and volunteering, it's occurred to me that there's a bunch of stuff that my Masters didn't prepare me for but probably should have. As well as a bunch of stuff that was COMPLETELY SUPERFLUOUS INFORMATION AND GENERALLY A WASTE OF MY TIME. But let's focus mostly on the former, shall we?

Things I Wish They'd Taught Me In Library School

1. How to contact books. 

So. Much. Contact.

When you're at the start of a roll of contact, it's pretty straightforward. (You know, unless you suck at contacting things and get bubbles everywhere) But when you're getting towards the end and all the contact wants to do is roll up on itself? It's a bitch and a half. Today, I had to use four pairs of scissors to weight down the corners. And a fifth pair to actually cut it. There should really be an entire subject on how to wrangle that stuff.

2. How to not squeal like an excited six year old when you come across a book that you loved as a kid and had forgotten about.
Last week's examples of this? The Bugalug's Bum Thief, aka the only Tim Winton book I've ever liked. Pagan In Exile, aka the book that contains my favourite blasphemous curse ("Christ in a cream cheese sauce!"). Come Over To My House, which is sadly out of print now, probably because it straddles a fine line between YAY DIFFERENT CULTURES and extreme cultural insensitivity...

3. There may be cockroaches.
Look, there may be cockroaches ANYWHERE, really. But when you're in a building populated by small children who like to drop crumbs and that's full of dark crevices? You will encounter them more than you would like.

4. How to not scream about said cockroaches in front of a room full of prep kids.
File under: things that would have been really handy last year when a huge cockroach fell out of a picture book and onto my foot.

5. You will always feel dusty.
Go look at your bookshelf. See how dusty the books are (even if you read/dust them regularly)? Multiply your book collection by several hundred and you'll start to understand. Always carry hand cream.

6. You WILL giggle hysterically while reshelving because some books have awful covers. 

I question your definition of "great"

Her heart says "yes", her eyes say "murder"

Friendship and demonic possession

7. The system will only freeze/play up when you have a queue of 25 six year olds staring at you expectantly with piles of books in their hands. 
True story.

8. You won't need to know how to MARC code.
Okay, sure, if you get a job as a cataloguer, MARC coding might be a handy skill to have. But for the vast majority of us, you can just go ahead and copy catalogue that shit. And if worst comes to worst, Google what 245 |a means.

9. Knowing your collection is more important than knowing Dewey numbers.
People are going to come in and say "Do you have any books about [for example] dragons?". Saying "Probably. Go check 398.2454 and see what you find!" isn't nearly as helpful as "Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction? If it's the former, we have Harry Potter, Eragon, the Temeraire series or The Hobbit. If it's the latter, we've got books on dragons in western culture, in Chinese culture, in Meso-American culture (though strictly speaking those are feathered serpents), in art, in literature, and in Dungeons & Dragons. Where would you like to start?"

That said, the Dewey Decimal Rap is pretty great:


10. Your patrons will crack you up more than you expect.
My favourite is still the kid who said to his friend "You know, pee is 90% water and 10% malaria", but the kid today who yelled "LET HER EAT HER APPLE IN PEACE!" at her friends who were watching me through the library window was equally hilarious.

Plus, on my first day? I discovered that a kid had shoved a book about the five senses ("Feeling with the fingers") in the puberty section. Said title took on a WHOLE different meaning.

Patrons totally make the dust and the cockroaches and the mysteriously sticky books worth it.

What elements of your job did university not prepare you for?

K xx

Another year over. What?!

I honestly can't even begin to process the fact that it's the 31st of December already. RIDICULOUS. Anyway, instead of doing my usual year in review post with a million links to a million posts that no one will actually bother to click through to, I figured that I'd do this year's wrap up in vlog form.


Happy New Year, y'all. I'll catch you in 2014!!

K xx

Best of 2013: Music and TV edition

I had intended to split this across yesterday and today, but yesterday was graduation, so I was eeeeeeeeeever so slightly busy. Here, have a picture of me looking incredibly dubious about the sleeves on my Masters wizard robe:

ANYWAY.

Let's start with TV shows, because there are only four new (to me) shows that I've loved this year and I'm pretty sure I've already blogged about how much I loved them:
1. Veronica Mars;
2. Orphan Black;
3. Elementary;
4. Sleepy Hollow.

Onto music. As I probably mentioned this time last year, I'm not really a big music person. I can't stand the radio, I rarely get all "Wow, I relate to this so much" about songs, and I generally have a policy of "Does this song make me happy? If yes, listen to song on a never ending loop. If no, skip song every time iPod attempts to play it" approach to things. Which means that I have a tendency to listen to the same 120 songs over and over again even though I have over 2,000 songs in my iTunes library. ANYWAY. Here's some stuff that got added to my "Press repeat" playlist this year, many of which I've been completely late to the party on:

Adele - Someone Like You
Neon Trees - Everybody Talks
Scouting for Girls - Millionaire


P!nk - Try
The Basics - Just Hold On
Darin - So Yours


David Guetta feat. Sia - Titanium
Mike Mains and the Branches - Stereo
The Basics - Hey Rain


Darin - Nobody Knows
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - Friday on My Mind
The entirety of the Pitch Perfect soundtrack


Ollie Murs - Troublemaker
The Basics - Home Again
Emmelie de Forest - Only Teardrops


Yes, Eurovision is completely and utterly responsible for three of the songs on this list, and the gym is responsible for several more. Oh, and Ylvis has also been on high rotation in recent months. Because OBVIOUSLY.

What have you been watching/listening to a lot this year?

K xx

#readWilkie

It's the 1st of November, and usually that would mean NaBloPoMo around these parts. But given that I'm going to be out of the country for the last two weeks of November, and will be too busy chasing hobbits having fun to blog every day, I figured that I'd do something else instead - a read-along of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone with LitNerd!

I've been a big fan of Wilkie Collins since I had to read The Woman in White for a class on the classic Victorian novel in first year uni. I loved it so much that I immediately went out and read The Moonstone, No Name, Armadale, and whatever else my university library had lurking in the 823.8 C713 section of the library.

It's been a long time since I last read The Moonstone, and a couple of days ago I added it to a list of books I need to re-read, so it was kind of perfect that I stumbled across #readWilkie later that same day! I might end up switching to the free Kindle edition half way through the month when I go to New Zealand, but for the meantime, I'm reading the 1998 Penguin Classics edition:

Source

It's not the prettiest edition out there, but it DOES have a multitude of end notes, and I'm a sucker for a good end note. (I learnt the hard way after buying one of those $2 editions of Emma when I was 15 and struggling through it)

It's not too late to join in - you can grab a e-book copy for free from Amazon or Project Gutenberg and start reading! And don't forget to check out #readWilkie on Twitter.

K xx

Top Ten Tuesday: Top ten books you were "forced" to read

Time to link up with the Broke and the Bookish again!

Today we're talking about books that we were "forced" to read, whether they were for class, for book club, or because friends were all "You haaaaaaaaaaaaaave to read this!!!". I've gone with a selection of books I loved and books that I really wasn't a fan of, because obviously you're not always going to like something someone else is making you read.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I had to read this for Year 10 English AND Year 12 Literature. I can remember - ridiculously vividly, I should add - getting my school books in January, and looking at the cover of the Penguin Classics edition and groaning because it just looked SO. FREAKING. BORING. I started reading it in the back of the car one day when my parents decided that we should go out for a drive (because OBVIOUSLY I had all my books for the year read before school started), and not wanting to put it down because I was so engrossed in the story. I've loved it every since.

2. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I read this out of sheer desperation because I'd run out of books and it was the only book available in English at the "book store" at the airport in Guatemala City. It kept me distracted, but mostly I spent the time it took me to read it thinking about how much the addition of Buffy Summers would improve the storyline. 

3. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

There was a time at the start of the year when literally half my Goodreads timeline was "OMG, I CAN'T WRITE A PROPER REVIEW OF THIS BOOK BECAUSE SPOILERS. JUST READ IT." I inevitably bowed to peer pressure and wrote my own review very much along the same lines. Seriously. If you haven't read it, you should go and do so immediately. 

4. Trainspotting by Irvine Walsh

In my first year of undergrad, I took English on the basis that I didn't know what my fourth set of subjects should be (the other three were Archaeology, History and Ancient Greek), and English had been my best subject at school. So I ended up doing a subject called Text, Criticism and the Visual, in which we read books, then watched the movie adaptations, and compared the two. It was pretty awesome, but this book? Took me FOREVER to get through, because the only way to understand about 60% of it was to read it out loud in a bad Scottish accent.

5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

As I've mentioned approximately a dozen times in the course of this blog, my first exposure to Harry Potter was in 1998 on a flight from London to Melbourne. The ten year old son of a family friend had fangirl flailed about them to us repeatedly in the previous week. My mum - who was on a different flight to me because mine had been booked as part of a school trip - handed me the first two books at the airport, and was like "Read them on the plane and tell me what you think". The rest is history.

6. Fly Away Peter by David Malouf

This book is only 135 pages, but it took me about a week to read it. This was one of our exam texts for Year 12 English (the other was Cabaret), so we had to read it and analyse it approximately a hundred times and then write a never-ending string of essays about it in the lead up to exams. Ornithology plus World War One? SNORE. There's a reason it's on a Goodreads list titled "Read these in school - would rather have a root canal".

7. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell

Another first year uni English subject book, this time for a class called The Classic Victorian Novel. I'd seen the BBC mini-series when it aired in 1999, so I knew the storyline already. But I wasn't quite prepared for just how much I would adore this book. And having seen the mini-series, I was completely unprepared for the book to just END, practically in mid-sentence. Damn you, Elizabeth Gaskell, for dying before you finished the story!! 

8. Un Lun Dun by China Mieville 

I had to read this last year as part of a book group assignment for a class on YA recreational reading. It was interesting in that when I read it, I mostly enjoyed it but was puzzled by certain elements. But in the course of the discussion, the things we disliked seemed to bounce off each other and snowball into a giant blob of "I DID NOT LIKE THIS BOOK". At the end of the day, I think its biggest problem was that it would have worked better as a series of short stories - it was trying to do too much at once, and wasn't 100% sure of its target audience.

9. Van Diemen's Land by James Boyce

I had to read this for work a couple of years ago, and it's one of the most engaging history books I've ever had the pleasure to read. Boyce is a fabulous writer and if you're interested in Australian colonial history, it's definitely worth checking out. I loved pretty much every second of it.

10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

This was another one that I had to read for first year English, and I hated it more or less from the get go. I despise all the characters, and the story just dragged on FOREVER. I don't think I've ever been so glad to finish a book in my life. 

So. There are my ten. What are yours?

K xx

Currently...

Given that I've been rather absent in the past ten days, I figured that I should let you all know that I'm not dead. You know, in case you were wondering. But considering I've used all of my brain power and cleverness on VEDA, I couldn't come up with anything particularly interesting to say.

So instead of thinking up a blog post, I figured I'd use the opportunity to catch you all up on what's been happening recently through a handy dandy meme thingy!

Watching:
I'm very late to the party on this one, but I've been watching a LOT of Veronica Mars recently. It's absolutely phenomenal, and I'm insanely excited about the movie coming out next year. Other than that, there's the usual Buffy and Angel for Snark Squad, and an AWFUL lot of Youtube videos, courtesy of VEDA.

Listening to:
The Pitch Perfect soundtrack is on high rotation at the moment. Also Titanium, because it's freaking awesome. The new Scouting for Girls single, Millionaire. And a lot of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes for reasons that will be discussed below!

Planning:
Tomorrow's VEDA video. Sunday's VEDA video. SO MANY VEDA VIDEOS. Super secret things that may or may not end up happening. We shall see...

Thinking about:
The fact that I upped my squat weight and my lunge weight at Body Pump today (15kg and 12.5kg respectively), and nailed it. How many VEDA videos I still have to watch. What to watch for Movie Monday. How many episodes of Veronica Mars I can watch tonight.

Looking forward to:
VEDA being over so I don't feel stressed out about not having time to watch All the Videos. Eventually having a job. October, because it's going to feature Must Be Thrifty and Cheap Geek's wedding, Kat visiting Melbourne, AND seeing Me First and the Gimme Gimmes live in concert. SQUEEEEE!!!!

Reading:
'Legend' by Maria Lu. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it - it feels a lot like every other dystopian YA I've read in the past couple of years. You know, girl meets boy, they don't get along, the government is evil, boy and girl fall for each other despite everything. I'm about two thirds of the way through, so maybe something dramatically different will happen between now and the end of the book to make me absolutely fall in love with it, but at this point? It's enjoyable but nothing out of the ordinary.

Making me happy:
The fact that I applied for graduation yesterday, and will be graduating with distinction. Making it through the entire shoulder track at Pump this morning without needing to change my weights. VEDA. Veronica Mars. Chocolate. You know, the usual.

So. What's new with you guys?

K xx

Stick a fork in me, I'm done

But not literally, because OW and also RUDE, IT WAS A FIGURE OF SPEECH.

Also, I FOUND MY TRIPOD YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

I apologise for the truly terrible lighting. It got crazy overcast this afternoon, so when the sun came out for all of ten minutes, I took advantage of it even though it meant that my face was basically fluorescent. Awkward...



Happy Friday, y'all. I'm declaring it Cider O'Clock.

K xx

Patience is a virtue

Patience and I have an all or nothing relationship. Waiting two years for a movie to come out? Sure! Fifteen hours trapped in a metal cylinder that's carrying me half way around the world by magic (and before you ask, no. I don't want to know how planes stay up)? Absolutely. Not a problem in the world. Be right here, watching movies and reading books and eating terrible food.

On the other side of the coin, if the tram is crowded? MUST GET OFF THIS TRAM NOW OMG ARE WE THERE YET. And basically the minute I order food, I start expecting it to arrive. I can watch the waiter/waitress walk away towards the kitchen and be like "OKAY. YOU'VE BEEN GONE FOR TEN SECONDS, WHERE'S MY FOOD???". Not that I would actually say anything because a) I'm aware that it takes longer than ten seconds to prepare food, and b) no one wants to end up on Not Always Right.

ANYWAY. One of the things I hate most is waiting to get assignments back. Because even though I've yet to get anything less than a distinction in my six and a half(!!) years at university, I still have a small inner panic attack that I'm going to fail every single time.

So obviously, handing in assignments electronically is ideal for me, because it means the lecturers upload the marks to the course website, and send us an email when they've done so. Getting assignment feedback that way is like ripping off a bandaid - over and done with in two seconds flat.

The situation I'm in at the moment is more like having your entire body wrapped in duct tape and the person who did it telling you that they'll be back in a week to take it off: incredibly irritating and more than a little stressful because you spend days building up in the pain in your mind.

In keeping with my theory that he's the ACTUAL WORST, I got an email this morning from the guy who ran the study tour. First of all, you should know that we handed in the last assignment for that class in EARLY MARCH. We have yet to receive any feedback. So my anxiety about my grades is worse than usual. Anyway, this email said several things:
1. That he's received our assignments back from the US.
2. That he'll arrange a time for us to collect them on Tuesday.
3. That he'll upload our grades at the end of next week.

So my choices at the moment are: a) rock back and forth in the corner biting my nails until Tuesday, then spend 45 minutes each way on public transport to spend 5 minutes at uni, or b) rock back and forth in the corner biting my nails until NEXT FRIDAY.

All of which is a really long winded way of saying AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH. And WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????????? And also WHY DID I DECIDE THAT TAKING A BUSINESS SUBJECT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA OMFG.

Happy Thursday?

K xx

Yay, filler posts!

I wanted to write a blog post today, but I had an assignment due, so a) didn't have time before now, and b) was brain dead about anything other than the history and function of archives, so instead of me writing something that requires brain ability, I figured I'd make use of some photos I took a week or so back and give you guys a tour of my book collection.

This is the bookshelf in my bedroom. It houses the top tier books - my absolute favourites, the ones that I would take to a desert island (yes, I'm aware that taking 117 books to a desert island is rather implausible). The top four shelves are fiction, shelved alphabetically by author and then chronologically within each series. If they're not part of a series, they're shelved alphabetically by author and title. The bottom shelf is nonfiction, shelved alphabetically by author, although recently I've been thinking that I should reshelve the nonfiction section by Dewey number, just because I can.

This is, at the risk of sounding like Dudley Dursley, the bookshelf in my second bedroom. Technically, it's the spare room, but it's the room I was living in when I first moved back from Canberra. And when my little brother moved out and I got my PROPER bedroom back, I moved my Canberra bookshelf up from the garage. These are the books that I still love love, but which don't QUITE make the "take to a desert island" cut. The first three and a bit shelves are fiction, and the bottom shelf and a bit are nonfiction. Shelved, as before, by author and series/title.

This is the first shelf of the cupboard in my "second bedroom". These are the books that I read from time to time, but which aren't important enough to me to warrant being on the bookshelves. They're stacked two deep on this shelf and are in pretty much no order. And the books you can see on the shelf below are picture books that I haven't looked at in forever.

This is the second shelf of that cupboard, which is mostly books from high school or first year English. They're only one deep here, hence the pile of odd books in front of them. And yes, that's a facsimile copy of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management on the right. It's kind of awesome.

This is the top shelf of the cupboard, which is more odds and ends that don't fit elsewhere. As you can see from the fact that Jurassic Park and The Lost World are sitting at the front, I do read stuff from here occasionally!

Moving to the next set of shelves over in the cupboard, we have the back row, which consists mostly of books from my teen years, and the front row, which is mostly Janet Evanovich and the complete works of Shakespeare. Because you never know when you'll want to read Titus Andronicus?

And this is the shelf under that, which is another row of books from my teen years at the back, and the box set of Laura Ingalls Wilder books at the front. As you can see, they're rather well loved. Oh, and my poetry book from year 10 English.

And then there are several of these under my bed and the spare bed. I only pulled out the one, because they're really dusty and they make me sneeze. This is mostly books I haven't read since I was about 15, but which I can't bear to get rid of because I loved them so much as a kid/teenager.

Aaaaaand finally, we have this collection of text books from my undergrad degree, and some other random books about archaeology of the "found in the bargain bin at the bookshop" variety. Oh, and on the right are my high school year books.

Yeah. I'm pretty much a total hoarder when it comes to books. Just call me Rory Gilmore!

K xx

Possibly not the best idea ever

So remember last month how I decided I was going to make a vlog every month? It's that time again.


I apologise in advance for my singing voice. I hadn't warmed up and was too lazy to rerecord it once I realised that I sound awful. And for the length of this. And for the fact that I'm posting this at nearly 1am - I started uploading the video at 7.30 and it's LITERALLY JUST FINISHED.

Have a calorific Easter, y'all. (Yes, I'm taking the piss)

K xx

Awesome books and giant forks

Whoops. Apparently I'm the WORST at telling you guys all about my trip. Previously, Lauren and I saw lots of planes and spy gadgets, and ate delicious cupcakes, as well as discovering the world's weirdest salad and an escalator for shopping trolleys.

SO. The rest of the time in Washington was somewhat less exciting.

Monday: Site visits to big businesses, including Walmart. Except we went to the wrong one on account of no one bothered to give the bus driver the actual address of the store. And then we had to stand around in the stockroom for an hour while the manager talked about supply chain stuff and I tried not to sneeze because we were standing next to box after box of laundry detergent and cleaning products. And then shopping time. At Walmart. Because that was something we desperately needed?? Oh, and after Walmart, we were dropped at Pentagon City shopping centre, where I managed to get stuck in a toilet cubicle. And lose the subway station. And message half of 20SB to tell them about it. The general response was "BAHAHAHAHAHA".

Tuesday: The World Bank in the morning, which was surprisingly awesome, followed by a couple of hours of free time. The Coolest People You'll Ever Meet took advantage of the time to to a mad dash past the White House:

En route to the National Museum of American History. The exhibits were similar enough to 2011 that I was able to steer us around all the important things in under an hour, including the First Ladies dress collection, which was all Inauguration Ball gowns. But mostly the 'important things' consisted of this stuff:

Idina Menzel's Elpheba costume. *flail*

The original Kermit

This was a "Things you'd like to see on display" suggestion board.
I nearly died laughing from this suggestion.

George W. Bush jack in the box

HARRY POTTER'S ROBES. No, I don't know why they're
at the National Museum of American History.

The afternoon was the International Monetary Fund, which was interesting but a little too financial for my brain to be able to process.

Wednesday: The Coolest People You'll Ever Meet got to skip an entire day of boring business studies classes in favour of a behind the scenes tour at the Library of Congress. And it was awesome. Well. Except for the part where we got lost finding the room we were meant to be in. AND the part where we were in a rush so ate lunch (wraps bought at the food court of a subway station) standing on the steps, and the security guards were like ".......You know you can come inside, right?" But I digress. Back to the awesome:

ROMAN LAW SECTION OMG.

You cannot even begin to imagine how awesome this room smelled

And then that night, Agatha Goodkin and I went to a bar to see a Swedish band called The Amazing. They lived up to their name reasonably well, although people + loud music + not eating dinner until 11pm = Curmudgeonly Kirsti. On the plus side, Angry Orchard cider is freaking fabulous.

Thursday: A millionty years worth of classes. All of which were about marketing, and all of which made me nearly fall asleep a thousand times.

Friday: MORE classes, including four hours about leading change which had us all nearly slitting our wrists. Oh. Except for the video they made us watch about merging two companies that kept including weird shots of the interviewer nodding in response to what the interviewees were saying. It was rather like a bobble head, only weirder. And Agatha Goodkin and I kept giggling as a result. That night was our farewell dinner. We ended up at the same microbrewery where Kat and I spent our last night in DC in 2011. And I discovered that they had GIANT forks:

A full day of business lectures will make you look MUCH older than you are.
Also, HOW ENORMOUS IS THAT FORK?!

I also got laughed at by a bunch of the guys on the trip when I ordered a peach martini at the bar and discovered shortly thereafter that it tasted very much like cough syrup. It pretty much ended up like this:

Like they can talk. A bunch of us ended up at a bar just off U Street shortly thereafter, and the guys proceeded to throw back a round of Picklebacks. *shudder* (To those not in the know, a pickleback is a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of PICKLE BRINE) Needless to say, I bailed shortly thereafter.

Saturday: A "tour" of Georgetown, which basically consisted of "Here's the main building. Here's a classroom. We're done now." Agatha Goodkin and I were not even remotely impressed with the tour leader for that. Still, Georgetown is pretty:

Once our "tour" was finished, we had about three hours of free time. So while a bunch of the others went shopping, Agatha Goodkin and I went for a walk along the Potomac:

After a rather rushed lunch, we had three hours of class about culture and social responsibility, which mostly seemed to be about marketing to different ethnic groups. Which was weird, because I don't think that's really something that happens outside the US...

ANYWAY. It was actually pretty interesting, plus there were massive boxes of Georgetown Cupcakes for afternoon tea. WIN. The Key Lime was pretty good, and the chocolate² was kind of amazing, but neither of them compared to the flavours I tried at the Bethesda one.

The trip back to College Park was...interesting. Have you ever tried to hail a taxi in peak hour on a Friday night? I recommend not doing it. I ended up in a taxi with three of the guys, one of whom proceeded to torture the taxi driver by alternating between a British and an Australian accent to prove how different they were.

And thus we come to the end of the Washington segment of the trip. Next up, FLORIDA AND ALL THE FABULOUS FRIENDS EVER.

K xx

Basketball, Baltimore and paperclips

I've been slacking off on telling you guys about my trip. Sorry. I've been struggling to write the assignments for it before semester starts, and am failing miserably... ANYWAY. Previously, we visited ALL THE FREAKING MONUMENTS EVER.

The following day started with a three hour lecture about the state of the US economy from a very enthusiastic lecturer of the "I'm old, I can say what I want" variety. As such, we came out of the lecture with such delightful quotes as "All countries are social experiments. Everyone is making it up as they go along. All you can do is hope that the folks with control over the big levers don't do something stupid." and "You have two options in regards to globalisation: play and be good at it. Or go live in a cave." 

So that was fun. From there, we had a break, complete with the most American of morning teas - Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks coffee. There were rather large quantities of both left at the end of the break. Once we'd finished our really quite awful delicious morning tea, we had an hour's lecture about staying safe on campus, which included telling us to phone the campus police to get a lift from the Metro station back to our hotel at night. Australian reactions to this? 

1. LOL, CAMPUS POLICE.

2. It's a seven minute walk on a well lit road.

3. Yeah, no.

I don't think anyone, even the Varsity Jocks who were out drinking until 3am pretty much every night, took them up on it... 

Then it was lunch, followed by a tour of the campus. Which is a buttload prettier than any university I've attended until now. I guess that's what happens when they're founded in 1856 with land already set aside by the government!! Weirdly, I KNOW I took photos on campus, but I now can't find any of them, so you'll have to settle for these photos of the mascot instead. Meet Testudo, y'all:

The university slogan is "Fear the Turtle", which is kind of hilarious because terrapins aren't exactly the scariest of beasts. When we finished the tour, Agatha Goodkin and I headed to the university bookshop, where I bought this hilariously tacky hoodie which for some INEXPLICABLE reason was massively marked down. (This is the back, FYI. And I plan on never wearing it outside the house)

I honestly think my favourite part was that when I bought it, there was a sticker on the front of it that said "If you like my front, you'll REALLY like my back!". Either that or the brand - Forever Fabulous. LULZ.

And then we spent the rest of the afternoon making the last minute decision to get tickets to see the Washington Wizards play the Oklahoma City Thunder and endeavouring to find a printer. Oh, also we did laundry. Because we're suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper rock n roll. 

And then we went to the basketball. My zoom lens came with us.

View from our $14 seats:

View thanks to my zoom lens:

BOOYAH. Although there was kind of an awkward moment where it turned out that we'd sat in the wrong seats and had to clamber over to the row behind. Not only did I climb over the seat in a manner reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence climbing the stairs to collect her Oscar, but when I finally sat down, I went "The alphabet is hard, yo." to explain the fact that we were sitting in row B instead of row C, and all the people around us were like:

Source

So yeah. That happened. Well done, Kirsti. 

The basketball was pretty amazing (especially seeing as we only paid $14!). The cheerleaders whipped their hair back and forth and I genuinely still don't see the point in them. I also didn't really see the point in the organ music. Or the constant timeouts. Or the fact that there was only like two minutes of sport at a time. BUT I DIGRESS. The Wizards won pretty much right on the buzzer, and we trekked back to our hotel. 

The following day, The Coolest People You Will Ever Meet (otherwise known as the library contingent) had a special trip to the National Archives to do some seriously awesomesauce training. It was completely amazing, and I'm still kind of astonished that ten people took a massive chunk out of their day to train the four of us. The rest of the group, incidentally, had to spend the entire day learning about the Dodd-Frank Act. Sucks to be them. 

On the Wednesday, we had a couple of site visits out in The Middle of Nowhere, Maryland. These were less than thrilling. And after the second site visit, we weirdly got dropped in downtown Baltimore for three hours. I still don't entirely understand why, and I spent most of it hanging out at Barnes & Noble. Because apparently Baltimore is the city that reads:

It also has quite a nice view across the harbour

I also may have had fried macaroni and cheese from the Cheesecake Factory for dinner. It was phenomenal. On the downside, the girl at the table next to me was a doctor, and was telling her friend horrifying stories about prolapsed uteruses. (Uteri? Uteruses? Screw it: baby growing organs.) So that was a gross accompaniment to dinner. 

The following day, we started classes bright and early. Our first class was on supply chain management, which basically required us to use a simulation game thing to pretend we were buying and selling computers. The Coolest People You Will Ever Meet...weren't great at it. The next class was on entrepreneurship. Which I have trouble spelling, let alone understanding. But the class started with everyone having to take 15 paperclips. And then we had to get into pairs and bet somewhere between one and three paperclips on the result of a coin toss. If we lost the toss, the other person got our paperclips. And at the end of a minute, we changed pairs. It was designed to show that entrepreneuring is hard work and most people will fail. 

Number of paperclips I had left at the end of the first round? ZERO. Yeah. I lost all my paperclips to a 21 year old undergrad in one minute. Clearly, I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur........... 

Next up, the most awesome lunch venue in DC, and hanging out with Sarah and Lauren!! 

K xx