Welcome to my office

I really, really like this desk (in an architecture library, naturally). Given the rate at which I buy books, I could actually build it this afternoon.

Books in today:
Stewart Lee's memoir/exploration of how humour works, How I Escaped My Certain Fate.
Lumsdon's Best Shropshire Walks, which looks a little pedestrian (thankyewverymuch, I'm here all week).
A used copy of Weldon Kees' Collected Poems (I read a couple of them recently after an MA dissertation mentioned them, and was seriously impressed. Like Simon Armitage but American and even less likely to turn up to pre-arranged meetings as he disappeared without trace in 1955).
A secondhand copy of Ben Highmore's Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (or as his publishers have it, ben highmore's cityscapes cultural readings in the material and symbolic city - clearly capitals and punctuation COST MORE).
And a CD of Othmar Schoek's Notturno for string quartet and voice because it's brilliant.

I've just finished Terry Pratchett's latest novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, and I'm hugely impressed. He's got such emotional range, an active liberal political and moral sensibility and a real grasp on the pace of a novel. Now I've moved on to Murray's Skippy Dies - a comic tale of overprivileged Dublin schoolboys towards the tail-end of the ludicrous Celtic Tiger period, with a seriously dark heart - very good indeed (and now being filmed by Neil Jordan). Its accompanied very well by Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen - much less bland than the Symphony 4 which fills the rest of the CD.