Happy New Year to one and all! I hope everyone had a sufficiently Christmassy break, eating lots, drinking more and being very merry. Now it's another new year, a new decade even, and we're all undoubtedly slightly less pleased with our appearances than before Christmas. But, I'm a student so a bit of extra weight should be enough to see me through the next term!
Looking back over my last year's blogging, it looks to have been a pretty poor turn out. So -
New Year's Resolution #1: Blog more.
Believe it or not I have lots to say but it just never seems to get written down. We can all use the excuse that we don't have time and I've been pretty weighed down by all that Renaissance reading those lecturers have given me but I've just spent 2 hours watching episodes of Friends I've seen more times than the number of real friends I have, so I can't be that short of minutes.
So watch out for more book reviews, more film reviews and hopefully a few more theatre reviews as well.
2009 was the year I started out as editor for the Arts, Books and Creative section of the University of Reading's student newspaper, Spark* and I can't believe I've gone four months without mentioning it. Well, the time has come to present the newspaper's website.
Set up late last year, the website contains all the articles and photographs published in the current issue of Spark*, so visit
www.rusu.org.uk/spark to take a look at we do. All the articles are written by those studying at the university and we pride ourselves on being one of the last remaining student papers still being produced entirely by students.
I hope to still be working on the paper throughout 2010, so I'll make it another blogging priority to update you on the top stories for students this year - we can get pretty miffed about stuff when we want to.
Well I suppose that's it for now - but don't lose faith in me because this blogger is definitely back in business! I might also embarrass myself with some of my own creative works later this year, but we'll see!
All the best for 2010!
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. His sister Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while.
In 1941, Irène Némirovsky sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. Némirovsky's death in Auschwitz in 1942 prevented her from seeing the day, sixty-five years later, that the existing two sections of her planned novel sequence, "Suite Française", would be rediscovered and hailed as a masterpiece.
