For a brief span of time, everything seems to be surprisingly not terrible...

Dear world: thank you for not kicking me in the teeth.

I'm feeling surprisingly all right with the world, thanks to a set of fortunate meetings, circumstances, and friends. My good friend M. has the good news of a job in London, and on Friday night there was climbing and pizza with him and his girlfriend. I'll miss him, but I'd forgotten how much I enjoy company. The world seems a lot better in the company of friends.

A good weekend, with plenty of reading and a little bit of work. Despite my usual not-sleeping trick, I managed to roll out of bed in time to go to class today. Success! Followed by photocopying of my interlibrary loans (and dear god I hate photocopying archaeological reports, because they're so awkwardly large), and lunch with another friend, J. Who is brilliant and smart and makes me feel as though I might be slightly smart, too.

After which I came home and napped for three hours. Napping is an astonishingly pleasant way to spend the afternoon, in case you were wondering.

And in further good news, there is a tiny flicker of hope on the horizon when it comes to money matters. On the horizon, not here, and tiny, rather than large - but it's nice to have even a little hope right now.

Books 2011: "Success without effort is honoured neither among men nor in the hollow ships..."

Books 2011: 180-183


180. Tamora Pierce, Mastiff.

The third and final Beka Cooper book. A little darker and more treacherous than the others, but a great read. I hope my review will eventually appear at Tor.com.


181. Elizabeth C. Bunce, Star Crossed.

A sixteen-year-old thief disguised as a lady's maid in a snowbound castle. Heresy. Politics. Magic. Betrayal. An engaging first-person voice with a sense of humour. Recommended.


182. David Weber, A Rising Thunder (eARC).

Acquired from Baen's Webscriptions through the generosity of a friend. Weber no longer even attempts to tell an engaging story or mini-plot-arc in a single volume. He's got the worst case of epic POV bloat I've seen short of Robert Jordan, and I'm not sure if we actually have any protagonists protagging around here somewhere. Disappointing: feels a lot like a volume trying to set up for the next book, and not really doing any of its own thing.


nonfiction

183. Pindar, The Complete Odes. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. Translated by Anthony Verity, with an introduction and notes by Stephen Instone.

Pindar came from Boeotia, from the city of Thebes. Born c.518 BC, he lived during the Persian Wars, dying prior to the Peleponnesian Wars in the fifth century. He is famous for his victory odes for athletes - an art form which is exactly contemporary with his life, as it seems to have gone out of vogue in the mid to late fifth century. (cf. Currie 2005, Hamilton 2003.)

This book comprises Verity's translation of Pindar's odes for the victors in the Panhellenic games at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia and Nemea. The odes themselves are an interesting look at the culture of praise and the culture of elite athletics - the athletes themselves were members of the elite: your average free stonemason in the street couldn't expect to send his sons off to compete - and how this relates to the portrayal of civic praiseworthiness in the Classical period. The translation is reasonably lucid, as a translation of Greek poetry: it's not itself particularly poetic, but it's clear and fairly literal, which is all to the good.

If you have an interest in Classical panhellenic elite culture, Pindar is worth the read. If you don't, it'll probably be all Greek to you.