It snowed just about every day this week. Not a lot each time- just an inch or three- but enough to make everything sparkly and white outside. If it were just a little bit warmer, a person could happily go for a walk in all of that, but when it’s 3°F and one still has a lingering cough from a stupid cold, a walk in the snow doesn’t sound like much fun.
I made a big expenditure this week. I’ve been looking for just the right couch for years. Literally years. I still have the old one my parents brought up from their basement when I got my first apartment in college. It’s perfectly fine structurally, but 1980s blue plaid is not my style. And while I have a slipcover to hide the unfashionable pattern, I’ve long wanted a couch of my own choosing.
The problem was choosing a couch. There were so many styles I didn’t like, usually ones with no arms or with arms that were as tall as the back. You can’t curl up very easily on a couch with no arms, and it’s hard to sleep on a couch with too-tall arms. Or, the arms would be the right height, but the couch would be one of those over-stuffed monstrosities that looks like a grand collection of pillows I wouldn’t be able to get out of.
Another problem is the prevalence of mid-century modern furniture in the last few years. Seeing as how I’m not a fan of mid-century anything, it made furniture shopping a pain.
But I did finally find a couch of the right size, style, color, and price! It’s adorable, and has Victorian/Art Nouveau stylings. They’re delivering it on Wednesday, and I can’t wait! My only problem now is what to do with the old couch.
I didn’t get a whole lot of reading done this week, but I did finish a book I’ve been looking forward to for a while: The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden! I’ll have a review later this week, but it was wonderful!
It’s filled with even more danger and intrigue for Vasya and her family as she is drawn into a struggle against bandits who are burning villages and kidnapping the young girls they find. Vasya and Solovey can’t turn away from the misery of the surviving families, so Vasya disguises herself as a boy and goes to help, ending up in the midst of a plot that’s far more dangerous than she could imagine.
My current reads are:
- The Wandering Falcon– by Jamil Ahmad
- Old Scores by Will Thomas, narrated by Antony Ferguson (audiobook)
- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
My upcoming reads include:
- Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke
- The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag, translated from the German by Katharina Rout
I started watching the Netflix show, Altered Carbon this week. It’s amazing! It takes place in the far future where everyone has a computer installed in their brains that saves all memory and personality. If the body dies, this computer- called the ‘stack’- is removed and implanted into a new body, which they call a ‘sleeve’. It amounts to near-immortality where a person can pay to have their sleeve upgraded for beauty or physical abilities. It’s bizarre to figure out at first, but it’s visually captivating and the story is told well enough that, in spite of the initial mystery, you’ll want to keep watching in order to figure out what’s going on. I’m on episode three, and intend to watch the rest of the series.
Star Trek: Discovery‘s first season finale is tonight. I’m both looking forward to it and not looking forward to it, because while it will settle a lot of storylines, it will be a long time until the next season!
And now for this week’s suspect Dutch phrase, brought to you by Duolingo:
Vertig kleine paarden tegen één grote eend.
(Forty small horses against one large duck.)
Traveling in Books 