The Newly Acquired

They’re here, they’re here! On Saturday, April 3rd, they finally arrived. I had hoped they got here before Easter, so I could curl up in bed and read them from cover to cover, but who am I kidding?! There are so many and I have just started on the last batch I bought 3 weeks ago.
But they came, and they are beautiful, and it felt like the world was shiny and new and happy. New adventures, new experiences, new thoughts (well, erm… so many of them are classics, but good stuff dies hard). I can’t wait to sink my eyes into them, and I’ve already started on The Book Thief. I have shown interest in it as a possible translating job for the publishing firm I freelance at, and maybe, if I do a good job on the one I am currently on, I will be so lucky 🙂

I also got Alice in Wonderland but I donated it to my niece, since she had never read it (and I have, but never in English), and because we went to see the new movie version starring Johnny Depp. I hope she likes it.

Easter was a fairly good time, I’m no longer a stickler for traditional festivities, but it’s always good to have collective holidays to fill up the roads and parks with people who wind down and eat too much. There is a vibe that fills people and they move at a different pace, the rhythm is somewhat less mechanical. Normally it’s “off the train, to the stairs, on the bike, at the job, move to lunch, walking home, fall in bed” but these days it’s like people don’t yell at the person next to them if they miss the train, or rush the food in just to get to the next appointment. They’re not over the top serene, flower-picking mellow, carefree, just not panicky. It’s nice.

I am reading “Et stille umærkeligt drab” by Kaaberbøl/Friis, a Danish crime novel duo. Borrowed it from the library, that somehow has managed to give me the one copy in the Kingdom that dropped all the pages between 96 and 129 only to double back to page 129 and repeat every word when I hit page 163. Confused? So am I. I am seriously thinking if this is some kind of literary experiment of some sorts. Maybe you don’t or can’t know what is going on on those pages, because life is like that. Sometimes you get cut off, and have to pick up at some random place, and sometime life is a big deja vu. But I don’t know; maybe I just put too much into an organizational mistake.

Happy April. Keep using ye ole noggin.