What's with today, today?

I know I have been doing very poorly at keeping up my goal of blogging more frequently this year, and am only now putting up pictures from my birthday earlier this month, while it is still the same month. Hope you enjoy them anyway! This year I turned 25, and for my birthday Andrew made me a spectacular chocolate mud cake type cake. It was very secretive and time-consuming, but I think he did an amazing job. The view from above. It looks so cozy, I would like to sit in that armchair by that fire and read those books. As it is, I nibbled on the armchair and ate those books (they are made of white chocolate + food dye + flavouring). There's me, turning 25 with cake, candles, bookshelf and friends (not pictured, but I swear they were there). After this we headed to the Berkelouw Books wine bar for some food and wine and book-browsing. For my birthday I got a lot of book vouchers (appropriately enough) among other things, so I spent Sunday book sho...

The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon is a collection of thoughts, like a diary, written by a court gentlewoman in Japan in the tenth century. This absolutely blew me away when I started, because it was impossible not to make comparisons to Old English literature, and there is just nothing like this in Old English (sidenote: though many works I studied in Old English are dated pre-10th C., technically the period ends in 1066, so this book is roughly contemporaneous with the late Anglo-Saxon period). This book seems so personal, in a way that Anglo-Saxon literature is not, and it's so concerned with the affairs of women (it's written by a woman) and everyday life, and aesthetics, it's like an entirely different world. There is something really incredible about reading something that seems so personal and yet was written 1,000 years ago. Besides, this book is a great introduction to the world of the Japanese court in the 10th century, with its descriptiveness and anecdotes. There...