Things

Bill bought me a copy of the British Library's CD-Rom of the Diamond Sutra as a congratulation-on-my-new-job present. It's really great. It has the whole sutra, the oldest printed book in the world, and is very readable. I was actually really pleased at how much I could read! It made me very excited about digitisation of historical sources. Most of the Dunhuang manuscripts are already available online, (though their new search engine is much more difficult to navigate than the last). But it's nice to have my own copy!
http://shop.bl.uk/mall/productpage.cfm/BritishLibrary/ISBN_0712343237

Last night we went to treadwells for a very nice lecture on Paracelsus. I will write up my notes later, but it was very informative and I learnt a lot. beluosus and I ended up chatting with Christina for ages, they had an interesting discussion of classical versus Renaissance thought. And I even managed to find another book by Agnes Smedley there which was a complete surprise! So all in all a very good night.

Today I spent the morning, while not fetching books, translating a traditional character email from Shanghai Museum for one of my colleagues. Tonight I'm going to have a quiet night in!

Tomorow will be celebration drinks at Quinns followed potentially by Club Bohemia.

Momo by Michael Ende

For Valentine's day Bill bought me an English translation of Momo by Michael Ende (Who is famous for The Never Ending Story). We bought a German copy while we were in Berlin on our honeymoon and Bill read the German and thought that I'd really like it. For some reason the chapter titles were shortened for the English translation, which was not as good and it also didn't have the nice illustrations, but the actual text seemed to be translated okay. It really encourage me to practice my German so I can read it properly. I've just noticed that Amazon.de have a cd of the story and think I might end up having to get that, as it would be very good practice to listen to more German, and hopefully now I know the story it would be a bit easier.

It was a very lovely and different story. It kinda reminded me of A wrinkle in Time sort of fantastic modern day children's fiction. The plot was about a group of gray men who were trying to steal everyone's time, and a young girl called Momo who ended up having the ability to defeat them. It read like a modern fairy tale and while the main character was a child, and it was obviously a children's book I think it was something most adults would enjoy.