All the Frills: Home Library

Over the past year or so I’ve been working at growing my collection of books. I’ve always had an inordinate amount of scholarly and academic volumes (a PhD will result in that), but my collection was lacking many of the great “literary classics”.

So I’ve been actively looking for interesting editions of selected titles to add to my bookshelves. As I engaged in this I realized that, in some instances, I was going to wind up with multiple copies of things (for example, I have a lovely, display edition of Shakespeare but also a more utilitarian set of the collected works and some individual editions of plays that I’ve thoroughly marked up and annotated and am unable to get rid of – so now I just have multiple editions). I was also lucky enough to find some amazing editions of classics scholarly works, like Fernand Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II. Here’s a peek into my expanding collection.

Weekend Reading:

• Iconic LA landmarks rendered in cake!
  
• Will the costumes in the upcoming Jem movie live up to the cartoon’s high-fashion spirit? I, for one, will be bitterly disappointed if they don’t.
  
• A collection of laughable signs from the folks at Buzzfeed.
  
• This is so bizarre – a graveyard of ET video games from the 80s judged to be so awful that they were buried en masse in the New Mexico dessert.
  
• The evolution of modern fashion and its class underpinnings/linkages can be traced to the 30s…this is a fascinating read.
  
• I stumbled across this awesome etymology website – which is perfect for me because I can only access the Oxford English Dictionary at work because the U of A library has a subscription and I can only access a limited number of Yale library resources as an alumnus.
  
• I both love getting yelled in a profane manner and being told what to make for dinner.
  
• How academia resembles a drug gang. This could also have been subtitled “I knew it!”
  
• Some of these are not all that great, but 4, 5, 6, and 8 sure are!
  
• Anyone interested in a little vacation planning inspiration? I’ve seen a few of these in person and now I desperately want to see all the others.
  
• The graduate students at Yale (where I gained my doctorate two years ago) are still working hard at unionization – I’m so happy to see this moving forward (it’s been a long road)!
  
• This piece about exploding whales is grotesquely fascinating.