So I finished my hundredth book yesterday, which means I am FREE FREE FREE from the New Year's resolution which was threatening to take over my life ^_^;; Don't ask what book #100 was. Christmas reading is allowed to be trash. It was a proper book-length book, alright.

So here are some recommendations.

Books that everyone in the whole world should read on pain of death because they are AMAZING:

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel - this was definitely my book of the year. I am a sucker for accurate historical fiction at the best of times and this is just a thing of such beauty, with its Mantelesque spare prose style, black humour, and indescribably complicated theme-age, that I do not even have words to describe it. One of the top five books I've ever read.*

New blog layout, woohoo! My obsession with Camille Desmoulins, let me show you it.

Number of books read this year for the Hundred Book Challenge 2009: 68. I CAN MAKE IT.

Number of people in my family tree: 914, and a whole block still to come when the scary lady at the Latvia State Historical Archives sends me the research I commissioned her to do. I think she may have tightly-scraped back black hair with a white streak and slink down dusty corridors in long skintight black gowns. With bats on. Also, I'm gonna have a party when I hit 1000.

Number of countries I am managing on my own at work since our Associate legged it back to his folks in the States: six. You've got to be kidding.

Number of months since I had LASIK: 5. Vision 20/20 in right eye, 20/15 in left (that's better than 20/20: I can see at 20 feet what the average person needs to be at 15 feet to see). Combined vision 20/15, or slightly better on a good day. ^_^

Number of continents I have left to visit before I'm 30: Two, but it's the most difficult two, Australia and Antarctica. When am I gonna find time to do that??

Number of awesome presents I got for my birthday: Lots ^_^

1 printer/scanner that sits in my sideboard and prints via wifi.

1 antique faience French plate with a picture of Camille Desmoulins looking like a twit, on his table at the Palais Royal, with his pistol and his hat. I'm so obsessed. ^_^

1 ginger cake with rhubarb cream icing, 1 enormous bag of pic'n'mix, and an ur-Flump. Like a normal Flump, but in a primevally gigantic sort of way.

4 DVDs of eclectic fabulousness: Pride & Prejudice (the BBC series, natch), Doomsday, In the Loop, The Wire season 1.

1 hand-embroidered bookmark with boingy things on going boing. I can't really explain it any better than that. It's awesome.

2 books, Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, who is a genius, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is ridiculous. I've nearly finished the latter already. Currently, Lizzie Bennet is single-handedly fighting off Lady Catherine de Bourgh's ninja bodyguard :-D

What actually happens when you have LASIK (if you are squeamish about eyes, stop reading now)

1. They make you put on amusing hospital gown over your clothes and shoe/hair shields. Little brother mocks you for this*

*Little brother not compulsory part of procedure.

2. You lie down and they give you loads of anaesthetic drops around your eye, as well as rubbing it with bright yellow sterilising stuff, which is presumably some kind of practical joke because they know you're not allowed to wash it off properly afterwards when you look like a yellow panda and aren't allowed to rub your eyes. Little brother mocks you again. They also give you two of those stress ball things to hold in your hands, which were actually very comforting - at least nobody tried to hold my hand, which would totally have freaked me out.

3. They put a suction ring thingy on your eye and then cut the flap in your cornea - fortunately the suction ring thingy momentarily knackers your vision so you can't see this bit and I didn't actually find out till later that that's when they did it. Little brother feels a bit off and has to move his seat so he can't see. Suction ring thingy doesn't exactly hurt but pressure pretty strong - feels like someone pushing a ring into the space around your eye really hard. Apparently the bit that cuts the flap has a great big long pole thing attached that extends from your eye and I looked momentarily like a cyborg ^___^

4. They take the ring off and your vision comes back but is now all blurry. Flashy red and green lights from the laser give you something to look at. Also they have filled you full of Valium so there is a certain urge to lie there going 'ooo, look at the pretty lights' which is of course exactly what they want you to do, so that's OK then. Little brother able to watch again.

5. Laser is actually the most pleasant part of the procedure because all you have to do is look at aforesaid pretty lights and the fit Polish technician dude is counting down for you while it's going. Also they do it in little ten-second bursts so it's much easier than I expected, I thought I'd have to keep my eyes straight for the full minute. There is a burning smell which would have been very disconcerting if I hadn't been warned to expect it. What is the cornea made of anyway?

6. They put the flap back onto the eye and the consultant then spends a frankly off-putting period of time prodding around smoothing it down. They put a bandage contact lens on (weirder than putting your own contact lens in because you're lying still and can see it coming towards you). Little brother has decided by now that this procedure may not be for him.

7. Rinse and repeat with other eye.

I walked into the operating theatre at 12.15 and was sitting back in the waiting room getting ready to leave by 12.45. ^_^ I understand what my colleague's mate meant now when he said that for the money you pay, you feel a bit short-changed...

...and then my lovely li'l bro drove me home and put up with me going 'whee I can read the signs in Piccadilly Circus / the road names / that car's numberplate' all the way back without actually punching me at any point. He's really very heroic on occasion.

Feels awesome. May have to wait a few days for development of ability to crumble city blocks with new laser eyebeams, but everything else coming along very nicely. And this morning I'm typing this without glasses ^______^ I still have a little bit of blur but that should settle over the next few days, and I suspect it's partly caused by the bandage contact lenses, which will be coming out in a couple of hours at the 24-hr-post-op appointment, hooray. (My clinic works Sundays, who knew?)

My inability to withstand temperatures below 24 degrees C is actually getting alarming, especially the bit where random toes go white and dead while wearing shoes, socks, jeans, tights under the socks and jeans, vest, sweater over vest, and sitting in a room temperature room filled with other people. Admittedly it is cold this week in Britain. Am starting to wonder if have actually died and not noticed yet.

Potential solutions:

Obtain geothermally heated underwear.

Drink even more tea than currently, thus turning self into giant hot water bottle.

Refuse to get out of bed ever (electric blanket, oh yes).

Hibernate for approximately 11.5 months of the British year. (it's like the international year, but with more rain)

Emigrate to Hawaii. Or Venus.

Shiny new kettle - looks exactly like shiny old kettle, only less melted and green. Has all-important glass so I can cackle like a maniac when the descaler makes it go all fizzy. *does the descaler boogie*

Alarm clock powered by battery, and alarm clock powered by mud.

DVDs of Takin' Over the Asylum, released at last (thankyou David Tennant, for getting famous ^_^), and Independence Day special edition (wot?) and the Die Hard quadrilogy, and Pirates III.

Books: The Frozen Thames, which is historical fiction via random vignette, v cute :-D Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space, Ivan's latest attempt to make me read proper sci-fi published after 1975. China Mieville - Looking for Jake, Ivan's previous attempt and a general success. ^_^ Cookbook from my brother (you know you're in trouble when your LITTLE BROTHER buys you a cookbook because he is worried about your health), which I have actually cooked something from, despite the fact that this required me to purchase vegetables.

Warm pyjamas with frogs on, Jane's latest attempt to deal with my apparent post-mortem temperature issue.

Crowley perfume. Yes, that Crowley. Don't ask. ^_________^

Waiting till you're a 27-year-old geek to learn how to carve a pumpkin produces awesome results.

1. Do not attempt to cross Unter den Linden in the middle of Gay Pride. You are likely to get run over by someone wearing nothing but peacock feathers, and if they miss you the army of street cleaners following behind to expunge every trace of the parade's existence will definitely take you out.

2. Berlin food is frickin' awesome. If given the opportunity, make sure you order the traditional local winter stodge meal of gigantic pig's knuckle with sauerkraut and potatoes. If it is 35 degrees C and everyone else in the restaurant is looking at you funny as they nibble their salad, hold your head high; it's not like you look like a tourist, after all.

3. Germany makes a lot more sense once you realise that it has been ruled by a succession of Mad Lord Snapcases for approximately four hundred years.

4. Should this require illustration, make sure you visit Potsdam, where the Park of Lunacy (TM) built by Frederick 'Fruitcake' the Great, where you can't take five steps without tripping over a palace, will soon put you on the right track.

5. Should it be 35 degrees outside, make sure you go to the Pergamon Museum first, so you can check out the Totally Awesome Altar before eight million screeching school tours descend, and make it out of the Babylon: Myth und Wahrheit und WTF were they Thinking? exhibition with a few hours to recover your sanity.

6. Marduk dragons are awesome. I want one.

7. The Bode-Museum is a cool, calm, collected and generally fabulous place to sit and sip coffee, because the eight million screeching school tours haven't found it yet.

8. These will make you sad and are really nicely done: the Holocaust memorial, which is like a cross between a maze and a library of giant concrete books, which start small and sun-warmed at the outside and then become tall and cool and monolithic in the middle. They're in a grid shape so you can see all the way along each aisle, and it feels like you're the only person in the world until suddenly a little kid flashes past you, or you come across somebody random standing round the corner.

The little brass cobbles with names outside the homes of people who were taken away. The Empty Library on Bebelplatz which marks the spot where the Nazis burned the books, which is a room with walls made of empty bookshelves, underground in the middle of the square with a glass roof you can look down through.