Noel Coward's The Vortex with Felicity Kendall

Last night beluosus and I took silkyraven out to see Felicity Kendal in the Vortex. It was wonderfull! Our "best available" tickets turned out to be in the centre of the 2nd row and we got to see Ms. Kenal perfectly! (SIGH) The play was highly entertaining, it was particularly fun to watch the cast get more drunk and high as the scences progressed. Helen and the Son were particularly entertaining. While not quite as good as The Importance of Being Earnest it was still highly enjoyable!

(thanks to short_mort for the new flatmates icon)

Library by Matthew Battles

I was loaned this book from one of the people at work. I was quite dissapointed, I was hoping for an interesting social history about libraries but instead got a rather dry normal history. The book took different approaches to books and libraries throught time. The book wanted to look at the intelectual history of the book, but focused in on rather small areas and didn't do a good job of relating these to each other or greater movements or any of the socio-political things happening in the world at large. It was also Terribly Anglo-American centric. It only mentioned China in context of burning of books, (Qin and the cultural revolution - though after finishing it I noted on the back it referred to the Qing burning of the books instead of the Qin, only a difference of about 2000 years between those dynasties!) and not anything about their great contribution from printing, paper, Dunhuang, and continuous libraries for the past 2000+ years. It mentioned the "huge debt we have to the Arabs who gave us paper, which they got from the Chinese". The chapter about the founding of the British library, and Dewey's work in American libraries was quite interesting. The 20th century looked at governments destroying books, instead of the growth of libraries and reading. All in all quite dissapointing, I'm sure there are much better books out there on this topic.