reading lately

1. Have mostly been reading stuff for Uni lately as there's one big exam left between me and my degree. (Hence the rare updates lately.)
2. Madam Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert as translated by the wonderful Lydia Davis. For anyone interested, she wrote a bunch of wonderful short essays on the Art of Translation for The Paris Review. Plus, there's a new movie adaption coming out in 2014. 

Looking foward to reading (once I'm freed from University):

1. Save Me the Waltz, by Zelda Fitzgerald
2. Grands Destins de Femmes: Coco Chanel, by Pascale Fey & Bernard Ciccolini - a comic book. I am hoping that being able to associate words with pictures will aid my non-existent French comprehension.
3. The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton. I read the first hundred pages of this in one go last week & then decided to put it aside for when I have time to properly devour it in one night.

"Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like moulded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily of the valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass, anemones pieced out of wash material, and malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs, and the voluptuous scrambled convolutions of Parma violets. She bought lemon-yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy, and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings, and every kind of white flower the florist knew how to grow."

Save Me the Waltz, by Zelda Fitzgerald