between the rock and the cold, cold sea

1. The last book you read:

Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah.


2. The book(s) you're reading right now:

K.S. Augustin, War Games (very slowly), Karl Marx, Capital (Oxford Classics abridged, likewise slowly).


3. Prefer fiction or nonfiction:

Depends on the day.


4. Why?

Because. I mean, fiction is lovely and wonderful and all that, but sometimes history is the only thing that scratches the itch.


5. A classic author whose work you've never read:

Jane Austen. Also Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, any of the Brontes, any of the 19th-century Russians, Trollope, Gaskell... I could go on. It'd be easier to name the ones I have read, to be honest.

Although I keep meaning to read the women authors of the 18th and 19th century.

So many books. So little time.


6. A book you'd like to read but probably won't have time for:

That's a hard one. Just one?

(Let's add "or money for," too, why don't we?)

Then we can start with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. How about Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy? Von Humboldt's Journey to the Equinoctal Regions of a New Continent! The letters of Sophia of Hanover! What about a history of Italy in the nineteenth century? Or Yehuda Halevi's poems? Or a history of Thailand? Or this book on West Africa?

The list, it is too long. So many books! So little time!


7. A book you've recently (for whatever values of "recently") added to the list of your all-time favourites:

I've got four. Leah Bobet's Above, Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts, Mary Gentle's Black Opera, and Amanda Downum's Kingdoms of Dust.

(What do you mean, three of those people are friends of mine? Still counts, right?)

2011:

I am 24.75 years old. I live in a town an hour by train from Dublin city on the northernmost coast of Dublin county, with my mother and Vladimir the cat. I am reading for a research degree, trying not to self-sabotage too much, and not to let intermittent shitty depressive moods affect my behaviour. On the whole, I'm succeeding rather less well than I'd prefer.

I have a degree in ancient history and too much imagination. I write poetry. I try to be mindful. I try to fail better - or at least, fail differently.

Oh. And from this vantage, the progress of the global handcart service (destination: the hell of your choice) seems to have speeded up.


2001:

I am 14.75 years old. I have not yet been diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I have been living in this house for more than a year, in this area for almost a year and a half. (With my mother, and with Conch the cat, who is shortly to abandon us for the pleasures of living wild. Back then, there were still rabbits behind the back wall.) It is approximately seven months since I cut my hair from a long braid into the short crop I've had ever since. I attend a Catholic girls' school, where I will in four and a half more years continue not to succeed in making any particularly close friends. I shout at my grandmother a lot, because I haven't yet figured out how to deal with her peculiar views of the world. I am lonely in ways I do not know how to express. Field hockey, reading, and writing juvenile attempts at epic fantasy are my solace. Intermittently, I have black terrible moods, which in retrospect look to me a lot like the shitty depressive moods I still have now, except with more fury and screaming.


1991:

I am 4.75 years old. I live a set of steps away from Claremont Strand, in Howth, Co. Dublin, in a low bungalow that catches sea-spray on its windows when the wind gusts high and from the right quarter. My mother and my grandmother are co-resident. Our immediate neighbour and landlady is a retired doctor of elderly vintage with a passion for gardening. She does not like small children. We do not have a cat, but there are several in the neighbourhood, the vast majority made of evil. They, also, do not like small children. I attend a Montessori preschool in a - Portakabin? I think it was - on the grounds of St Mary's Anglican church, adjacent to Deer Park, the desmesne land attached to Howth Castle (I don't know if the hotel and golf course was there back then: probably), from where I retain a strong memory of learning to read and form simple words like "jug" and "cat", and finding them insufficiently challenging. If it were not for this particular memory, I would not recall a time before I read with reasonable fluency. My grandmother takes me walking beside Howth harbour, and in summer - I'm nearly sure it started that summer - we lie down on the grass beside the sailing club and find pictures in the sky.

I am utterly self-centred and, mostly, blissfully happy.


1981: I do not exist.

Since you asked, Kat.

SIX NAMES YOU GO BY.

1. Liz
2. Elizabeth
3. "Hey you!"
4. Bourke
5. hawkwing_lb, but only on the internets.
6. And to the greataunt I never broke of the habit, Lizzy. Anyone else calls me that, they die.


THREE THINGS YOU ARE WEARING RIGHT NOW.
1. glasses
2. SU t-shirt which I changed into after climbing.
3. black combats

THREE THINGS YOU WANT VERY BADLY AT THE MOMENT.
1. time
2. more time
3. to have my exams over and passed.

THREE PEOPLE WHOM YOU HOPE WILL DO THIS MEME.

If you wish.

THREE THINGS YOU DID LAST NIGHT.
1. slept
2. read halfway through Busman's Honeymoon
3. worried.

THREE PEOPLE YOU LAST TALKED TO ON THE PHONE.
1. Local pizza place.
2. The parent.
3. The grandparent.

THREE THINGS YOU ARE GOING TO DO TOMORROW.
1. Study.
2. Go to a bookshop.
3. Go to the gym and run. I hope.

THREE OF YOUR FAVORITE DRINKS.
1. Chai latte.
2. Orange juice.
3. Tea!

THREE THINGS THAT MADE YOU SMILE TODAY.

1. Climbing! I led a 6A I'd never tried before, and a bunch of other routes, including a good attempt at a 6B on the roof, and the Best Climbing Mate was his usual charming self.

2. Tea! Met the parent this evening and went to the Tea Gardens on the quays, where there was masala and tuareg tea and biscuits and Japanese rice crackers and tea!

3. Last class of undergraduate career ever, in which we cracked each other (and the lecturer) up with our hysteria and inability to be serious, and our ability to sprint off on tangents utterly unrelated to the task at hand. Gigglefits.