the Dalaverse

I had a good day. Instead of taking the bus from Glen Eyre into the city centre, I walked about a mile and a half to the Avenue Church stop and picked it up there. I usually only go down there for shopping, but today I wanted to finally check out the city branch of the library. The two smaller ones in the uni and Portswood really suck, but the main one's much bigger. Also, it has the city art gallery, which is really tiny and not particularly interesting except that it has Burne-Jones' Perseus series. There's one Ford Maddox Brown painting (a rather dull Christ scene I'm not familiar with), one tiny Monet, one tiny Renoir, and a portrait apiece from Gainsborough and Reynolds...but all I really care about is the Burne-Jones. 'Perseus Showing Andromeda the Head of the Medusa' is one of my favorite paintings, and it was just down the street all this time. So I can cross that off the list - next we go to Jamaica to see 'Flaming June' (I still have no idea WHY it's in Jamaica).

So actually, the library is pretty awesome - three whole floors. I wandered fiction for a happy hour and picked up the really good book on the Armada, True Women (which I lent out several years ago without having read and never got back), The Queen's Fool for a thought-free reread, and most importantly Geraldine Brooks' new novel People of the Book. I am deeply excited that they had it, it doesn't even look like anyone else has checked it out yet (artaxastra, I think you would love this one). Geraldine Brooks is my new favorite after March and Year of Wonders (I actually thought the latter was the better novel). I need to track down her non-fiction as well.

Then as I was leaving, I took a look at the layout sign because I knew there were some sections missing on the main floor. Upstairs was religion and philosophy and downstairs was reference - and a Maritime Special Collection. Of course I had a massive freakout and ran down to check it out, and it was seriously impressive. I mean, you'd think duh, it's Southampton and all, but it simply never occurred to me that the public library would have a maritime collection rivaling the one at A&M. And I have to assume Fraser and Jon don't know about it either, because to not tell us about it when we spent all last semester fighting over the uni library's pitiful collection of our books would be cruel. I shall have to ask Jon about it next week. I already called Kelley to share the bounty. It's a reserve collection so you can't check the books out, but you know what that means? It means assholes can't check out all the good ones and horde them for weeks. Doesn't bother me, not after writing twenty papers from Bodleian resources. It's just like our own mini-Greenwich!

I hopped on a bus back, my nose buried in Brooks, and made pasta with tomatoes and feta cheese for dinner. Okay, so the tomatoes were canned, but they were in juice with basil and garlic and the whole thing actually tasted awesome. Next time I'll get fresh basil instead of my dried stuff. And now I have mini jaffa cakes for dessert, and a pile of books to curl up with.

Yeah, good day.