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.*

*also responsible for the obsession with Camille Desmoulins with which I have been annoying everyone ever since**, and her obsession with Robespierre. We went to France and geeked. It was good. ^_^

**in case you hadn't noticed a certain theme about this blog at present.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Nearly as good as A Place of Greater Safety. Nuff said. In truly typical fashion, I discovered this book, geeked out about Hilary Mantel, and just as I had reached a point of true smugness about my highbrow love she went and won the Booker Prize and got cool, dammit. On the other hand, this is the first time IN HISTORY that the person I wanted to win the Booker actually won.

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphrys. You may be noticing a theme here ^_^;;; there are two things I love; historical fiction with obsessive accuracy, and spare prose styles that don't overload you with florid adjectives but give you the elegant structure of the text and let you work the rest out for yourself. This is a collection of beautiful half-poem half-prose vignettes about different occasions in London's history on which the Thames froze. Really lovely.

And just to complete the set, Regeneration by Pat Barker. I've read this before, but not so recently that it would have been cheating for the challenge. Beautiful, mournful, dispassionate study of the interactions between Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and WHR Rivers, while Sassoon and Owen were patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital during the First World War; and the changes in British society brought about by what was happening in France. Also featuring Billy Prior, one of my most beloved OCs ever.

Other books from the hundred that come highly recommended, but were not quite earth-shattering enough for me to be arsed to write a mini-review:

The Fears of Henry IV - Ian Mortimer
Sybil - Disraeli
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
Luminous - Greg Egan
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
Camille Desmoulins and his Wife - Jules Claretie
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
The Bartimaeus Trilogy - Jonathan Stroud
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
The Rose and the Ring - W M Thackeray

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

Lower case 'e', on the other hand, is a sort of milky transparent-ish white that doesn't really bother anyone as long as it doesn't gang up on the other letters in words without any stronger ones, like 'sheet', which is white with a splash of foresty green at the front where the 's' is trying to muscle in.

Numbers are almost exclusively really, really bright. I suspect this is not just coincidental, as numbers are more individually meaningful and I've always wondered if that affects how 'bright' they are. Synaesthesia doesn't change with age - the letters will be the same colour when I'm 90 as they were when I was seven. I rarely make spelling mistakes, because to me 'paralel' is a completely different colour to 'parallel' - it stands out like a sore thumb if you get it wrong. On the other hand, I can make really surreal mistakes and type totally different words in place of each other if they're the same colours.

True fact: synaesthesia is inheritable, and my li'l bro has it, though not as strongly as I do. His colours are not all the same as mine, but they're almost all similar. About ten years ago I told him the colours of my PIN number, and he guessed it (three digits right first time, one digit took him two tries because he had red where I have hot pink) Go figure.

Anyway. I had a lovely birthday, and the icing on the cake is that I'm NOT 27 ANYMORE, yay!! Because '2' is a lovely bright electric blue, but '7' is a really nasty muddy brown. '8' is lemon yellow, which makes 28 quite a pleasing combination. I like being 28. I'm going to love being 29, which is one of my favourite colour combinations (blue and pink - wouldn't be nice if you saw it in real life, but somehow as a synaesthetic combination it's lovely).

'3', on the other hand, is a horrible grungy orange. I'm not going to like being in my 30s. I'm seriously considering being in a foul mood the whole year I'm 37 (maybe I'll skip it and spend two years being 38).

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?)

Rules: No old sickday favourites, but books read previously are allowed.

Two down, 98 to go:
Jumper - Stephen Gould
Pistols for Two - Georgette Heyer (yes I started with some easy ones, what???)

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.

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. ^_________^

(Mine's the Cylon, the seal of Rassilon is hers, and the Saint belongs to her)

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.

9. The Communists have the best little green men.

10. Have I mentioned the food? Kaffee und Kuchen. Schnitzel of multifarious kinds. Long lazy Sunday morning brunches which start with eggs and bacon and end with chocolate pudding and jelly.

11. Should you be loitering around the Brandenburg Gate on a weekday, go into the entrance hall of the boring, concrete-fronted DZ Bank building and stare in awe at the insane architecture inside. The Norman Foster cupola on top of the Reichstag is pretty cool as well, if you can be arsed to queue long enough to get in.

12. Do not attempt to find your way around the Deutsches Historisches Museum in chronological order following the numbered signs unless you are extremely good at Sudoku.

So I spent a lovely morning lounging on my balcony and finally (finally!!!) finished Consider Phlebas, which I enjoyed very much, largely because of Iain M Banks' use of the word 'mug' which cracks me up each and every time. But, y'know, not to be too spoileriffic but the ending doesn't leave you skipping through the park from the sheer joy of being alive, exactly.

And then I went to the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn with Mum to see To Kill A Mockingbird, acted entirely by lawyers and directed by the blonde one out of Blake's 7. Which was really very good, especially since the actors weren't pros and despite the rather ropy Southern accents. (Amazingly to me, there were people in the audience who didn't know which way the verdict was going to go o.O) The kid who played Scout was *awesome*, as was the Sheriff, and now I know what Scout's fancy-dress ham costume was supposed to look like (I always wondered ^_^). But, again, skipping through the park from the sheer joy nuh-uh.

And then on the bus on the way home I thought I'd amuse myself with a little light entertainment, except I picked season 2 episode 4 of Jericho, and WTF PEOPLE HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF FORESHADOWING?? A little dramatic signalling would have prepared me better for that one @.@ Also, you get really funny looks on the bus when you had the volume set for TV conversation and suddenly they're getting noise pollution from your little tinny shotgun blasts. Not that it wasn't nice for something to happen in a TV show that wasn't totally predictable for once, but I think that was about my pain tolerance for the day.

*stomps off to watch Chocolat*

Fifty-two emails
Eighteen spreadsheets
Five presentations
Three enormous transactions at less than three days' notice each
Two client visits
One clunky Java-based database interface
No sandwiches (because the client didn't want lunch and so we were all too polite)
And a partridge in a pear tree.

*crawls into bed to die*

From Frederica, by Georgette Heyer, set 1818:

"Oh, don't fly off the hooks again - you can have no notion how bracket-faced you look when you get into one of your pelters! Console yourself with my assurance that if Buxted had left you purse-pinched I should have felt myself obliged to let you hang on my sleeve."

From A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, set about ten years later than now, whenever now may be, although there aren't really enough computers to get away with that for much longer:

'We came at last to a sort of village, and just outside this village was a small sort of a cottage on its own with a bit of garden. The Luna was well up now, and we could viddy this cottage fine and clear as I eased up and put the brake on, the other three giggling like bezoomny, and we could viddy the name on the gate of this cottage veshch was HOME, a gloomy sort of a name.'

And they're both using it for approximately the same purpose as far as I can see, which is to make the dialogue sound vernacular, as if you're reading a transcript of someone talking instead of an authorial account. I'm not sure also whether there's an intention to create verfremdungseffekt, to remind you that you're reading fiction and not living in the world of the book. You wouldn't think that would be Heyer's idea, at least, since she's writing a Regency romance, but I'm not sure that it doesn't emphasise the fantasy/daydream element of the books - makes them feel more like a fairytale (or at least, distances them further back in subjective time).

I certainly find it helps me enjoy her books, because it puts me in the right frame of mind to ignore the aspects of Regency culture and romance novels that would otherwise make me want to punch the male protagonist every fifteen pages. ^_^ Alternatively, they're both just authors who adore playing with language (has anyone ever read Burgess' Mozart and the Wolf Gang? One of those books (like the Baroque Cycle) that seem specifically designed to remind you that compared to the author you're really quite dumb.)

And if you cared enough to read that, here is an English to Nadsat translator which has been amusing me immensely for the past half hour. Feed it dialogue.

all the world's a stage,
and all the chellovecks and cheenas merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances,
and odin chelloveck in his raz fillies many parts,
his acts being seven ages.