Black hole and shining stars

Yesterday I visited the Oxfam bookshop, which seems to me to be somewhat like a black hole, when considering my money and my time. Yesterday I bought 2 more books there, Selected Letters by Jane Austen, and Writing and Difference. Which brings the total count of Oxfam books to 7 since I got home 2 weeks ago ( the others include The Pilgrim's Progress, an annotated Lolita, a book on Elizabethan Colonisation, a book called How the Scots invented the modern world, and one entitled Women's Oppression Today, which is a marxist/femminist book I'd never actually heard of till I found it, but I'm sure it will be very interesting.) Of these I've so far read the Scottish History one, although I still don't think the Scottish invented the modern world, although they did do some pretty groovy things, like bring the first lending library to Britain and so forth. Still I don't think inventing the library, marvelous as it is as a concept, is quite the same as inventing the modern world. I've also bought several books for my course (Winter's Tale, Othelo, 'Tis pity she's a whore, Priccesse a Cleves, and a poetry anthology) and of course The second sex because the library refused to lend it to me. Which means three things, one, I'm much poorer than when I got home, two, I have a LOT of books to read, and three, I have no idea how I'm going to get these books back to York. Still. It's all good.

On a slightly different note I've just finished a book called The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, which I would definitely recommend reading. It's beautifully written and actually very interesting because it has so much random information about the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It was quite fun reading about the Dangerous Diseases Acts and things in fiction since I'd done so much research on it last term.

Lastly sorry for the less than prosaic title for this post, I thought it would liven things up a little!