I've been very abstemious with the books recently - down to a trickle of 4-5 per week. Until this week - a couple of Jane Austen books, The Geek Manifesto (copies are being sent to every MP, thanks to Transworld and sympathisers) and a pile today which really demonstrates why I never get anything substantial done - my interests are too easily attracted by shiny things.
So today I got some books from the rather magnificent annual OUP sale: Frances Horgan's translation of that medieval French classic The Romance of the Rose, Corley's translation of Lancelot of the Lake (it turns out I already have the same edition, so if you want it, present yourself at my office next week), and Kent Puckett's Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Not my field at all, but it sounds fascinating and will go on the shelf next to Marcus et al. on the Victorians' filthy sex lives. (Shelfmark: Tea-Tribadism).
Also in, Robert Stradling's Wales and the Spanish Civil War, which has some interesting detail on Lewis Jones I hadn't seen confirmed, but nothing on the mysterious 'Frank + Beat' (friends of Lewis's) or the Cambrian Pit miner, communist and Spanish Civil War veteran whose handwritten autobiographical notes were found in LJ's copy of Das Kapital. If you think you know who it is, let me or @cathfeely know: it's her baby.
I'm currently reading The Geek Manifesto to angry up the blood, Alan Plater's Beiderbecke and Colbert's edited collection Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (I've borrowed the author's copy, but you'll have to find £50 to get your mitts on it) for a paper on Borrow and O. M. Edwards. When I'll actually start writing is anyone's guess… Not tomorrow though - I'm off for a long weekend, then it's the staff research conference on Monday.
Au revoir!
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