My beloved @ninadove tagged me last year to do this. Here I am now 🥰 THANK U SO MUCH ANGEL

1. The last book I read Read? Don Quixote. Finished? The Watermark.

2. A book I'd recommend As I'm sure all my loyal followers have doubtless devoured The Count of Monte Cristo by now under my barrage of threats, urges, & pleas, I will switch my recommendatory spotlight to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — my favourite professor, narrating the inexorable decline of a Gothic horror plot as if it were an enchanting & exhilarating adventure novel, awaits you~ 🌊🦦🐚✨️

3. A book I couldn't put down Project Hail Mary had me staying up to unwise hours, especially in the last third or so

4. A book I've read twice or more I've lost count of how many times I've read the Odyssey. The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy doubly so

5. A book on my TBR ...the Odyssey, translated & annotated by Daniel Mendelsohn this time!

6. A book I've put down Great Expectations, which I only picked up at the time as required (to me) reading for better understanding one of the Thursday Next books

7. A book on my wishlist Pope's purple prose translation of the Odyssey! Since Lawrence's let me down at the foreword

8. A favourite book from childhood Ohh, I was a fiend for the Rainbow Magic series... But I don't think I had one favourite above the rest. I also liked Emily Rodda's Rondo trilogy! Our teacher would read out a chapter to us at school every week :) The school year finished partway into the 2nd book, so I finished it using the library's copy, then bought the 3rd for myself. I remember fondly rereading it, even though I've forgotten most of the contents by now.

9. A book I'd give to a friend I have given Invisible Cities before & would do so again. Beautiful, brief, delightfully digestible. Why not check out the first two parts here? Recorded expressly for you to enjoy and/or fall asleep to

10. A book of poetry or lyrics that I own Simply titled Haiku, this collection of translations by Hart Larrabee contains selected works of the 4 haiku masters, my favourite of which has always been Issa <3 I have plenty of Bashō but I'd like a book purely of Issa's work someday

11. A non-fiction book that I own The White Mouse! Nancy Wake's autobiography :) A resistance fighter & spy in WWII France, whose exploits, charm, genius, sexcapades, & titanic feats of endurance are the stuff of cinema 🐁

12. What I'm currently reading A few... Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Sport for Jove's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, & Ella Minnow Pea, which is a reread & which I highly recommend to any lover of words or word games. I'm also rereading some books w friends, namely the Odyssey (Wilson), The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, & Invisible Cities on this very blog!

13. What I'm planning on reading next Lady Death (Lyudmila Pavlichenko's autobiography, another WWII action heroine), then Wuthering Heights

The new Wes Anderson in a cinema, Shakespeare (naturally), & a Disney film that touched me more than I expected it to. Every other film I watched was at least partly a rewatch 🏀🍊🌕

U can pretend that that's actually the whole Indiana Jones series (bonded set — do not separate!!!). I only picked Raiders emblematically & also bc Marion is in it ❤️

Honourable mentions to Arrival (so so different tonally) & Lupin III: the Castle of Cagliostro (keeping myself to one anime film) 🖤💚

@oatflatwhite tagged me to post 6 non-selfie photographs & here they are 📷

U know I would cosplay as the sky every day if I could... ☁️☀️

— TAG NINE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO GET TO KNOW MORE!

Currently reading: Lady Death: the Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko's autobiography. She has many striking stories of her time training as a sniper, as well as the sieges of Odessa & Sevastopol in WWII (where I'm up to so far). I enjoy her voice & temperament, that of a sniper, which she describes as taciturn, withdrawn, sullen — I call it modest. It's been great to read in this climate, where we all seem to have forgotten how fascism must be obliterated. She also touches on what it was like being a female sniper specifically, what she could expect if the fascists caught her in the forest. "The grenade was for the enemy, seven bullets were for anyone who got too close, and the eighth was for yourself." And even still, she mentions that she preferred being on the front lines with her men — even under enemy fire — to being in the back lines with the officers, who all too often abused their office upon "taking a fancy to her".

The last book I finished was Sport for Jove's translation/adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, set in WWI & so insanely good & true to the vision of the original that it needs its own post(s)

Last song: Starship Velociraptor! 💥🚀🪐🌌💫🛸🌠

Last film: Jane Eyre (2011), at long long last!! I'd been meaning to watch that since high school

Last series: Does Le combat des chefs, the Asterix miniseries, count? If not, MASH. But the last series I sat down & finished was The IT Crowd

Sweet/savoury/salty: Sweet but I love them all!

Tea/coffee: Love tea, hate coffee

Working on: My Invisible Cities storytime project here has been put on indefinite pause bc this infernal cold has utterly ravaged my voicebox -_- I've taken up learning hiragana again in the meantime. Oh, & I started playing Pentiment! 🏰📜