Aelfgyfu

Recently read books

I'm not sure what's most embarrassing: that an English professor reads so few books outside of her job these days, that I've already forgotten the names of characters in two of the three novels I read, or that I already can't easily lay hands on the first of the three novels I'll mention. It's somewhere in the house. We have hundreds of books. Maybe thousands.

I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum in my reviews, but I make no promises about comments.

( Neuromancer by William Gibson )

( Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke )

( The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien )

The British Library has been digitizing manuscripts for a while now--lots of Greek, a few medieval, a few post-medieval. They have now digitized the glorious Lindisfarne Gospels and the Old English Hexateuch.

It would be nice if you could just click links from their little article to the two specific manuscripts, but of course I can't seem to do anything that sensible. You can follow their link to the search page, though, and then enter "Lindisfarne" as the Keyword to see the one, and Hexateuch to see the other. They are amazing.

I have a terrible feeling that I'm forgetting a book here. Very odd. I hope that if I am forgetting, someone will remind me (such as Brilliant Husband!).

No serious spoilers, I hope, but below the cuts anyway.

( Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler )

( A Mercy by Toni Morrison )

Feel free to include spoilers in comments if you've read either book; by the same token, beware: comments may contain spoilers!

Here's an awesome little video showing a little bit of the digitization work the University of Kentucky has been doing on the St. Chad Gospels, with the cooperation of Lichfield Cathedral. It's just over two minutes. Gorgeous! ( Embedded video under the cut )

Three of the four volumes of the Rochefoucauld Grail are up for auction; they're expected to fetch around £2 million.

Be sure to see the nine-image slide show of the illuminations.

It hurts my heart to think of these gorgeous volumes being sold into private hands, though they're already there. Would someone buy them for the British Library or the Bodleian? Please? Anyone?

I loved Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters. I don't need to give a long review. Most of you have probably read it already. It's brilliant—and there are Shakespeare jokes. If you haven't read it, do!

I need more space for Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron. I'll put spoilers under a cut because I know at least two of my friends have read it and I want to talk about details.

The non-spoilery bit: I loved it. On his website, Jasper Fforde clearly labels it "Shades of Grey 1," so I feel assured of a sequel (though another Thursday Next book is due out sooner, apparently, with book Thursday rather than our Thursday, if I can even say that. Um, where was I?). I very much want a sequel in this new series as well.

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron was not as funny as the Thursday Next series often is, but it had its moments of comedy and even hilarity (including the bit on grading I shared with some of you). It's more thoughtful and thought-provoking and even frightening than Thursday Next.

The Shades of Grey world seems to be a future of ours or a world much like ours, but it's after Something Happened. Life in this world is very different, we learn right away. Most people don't see colors plural. Some see only gray. Some see only one color. The degree to which even those who can see a color can see it varies. Everyone can see artificial colors, but they're expensive to produce. Everyone lives a highly rule-bound life. Our protagonist, Eddie, seems a tad dense, but I found him quite sympathetic (and I don't think it's truly a spoiler to say that he becomes less dense).

I stayed up late one night to finish this book. That should tell you something. Sleep is precious!

( I read it! Take me to the spoiler-filled discussion! )

Thanks to or_mabinogi for a fascinating article on "Mapping Ancient Germania"! The title of the first part is a little misleading; it wasn't a matter of cracking a deliberate code but of correcting for a series of errors. Note too that despite the caption, the first photo can't be "A 2nd-century map"; the article mentions a thirteenth-century copy, and perhaps that is it. That's not a picture of a second-century manuscript.

Yes, I'm nitpicky. It's still really exciting! As the second part of the article suggests, this research may help archaeologists have a better sense of where to focus their efforts.

I am amused by the title of this article: "What do you do with 8 million books? Build a shelf 153 miles long," by Richard Garner, The Independent. They offer pretty darned good retrieval times, and the thought that they were storing books in a former salt mine makes all kinds of alarms go off in my head.

(No, I'm not really a librarian myself, although I worked part-time in a couple of libraries when I was younger. My userpic is a quote from the third Librarian movie, and I just love it!)

The University of South Carolina now has a complete medieval English Bible, circa 1240, about 7" by 5.5". That's the only complete English Bible in the American South. sigh It's a bit of a drive from Florida.

The second half of the little video clip in the article shows the Bible itself.