It's the end of the semester as we know it (and I feel fine).

My grades are turned in, which means this semester really is over. Mmmm, pumpkin spice coffee... :)

A few quick notes:

1. Thanks to beledibabe for the lovely card and fantastic bookmark! Woohoo!

2. BBC News has some fun limericks that answer the question Is Lewis or Tolkien the best?

3. Powys Media, publisher of the new series of books based on The Prisoner, has announced the second and third books in their series. The second, due in Spring 2006, will be The Other by Lance Parkin, who won the Doctor Who Magazine poll three times as favorite author. The third, due in Fall 2006, will be Miss Freedom by Dr. Who script editor and novelist Andrew Cartmel. For a great review of the first novel, Prisoner's Dilemma by Jonathan Blum and Rupert Booth, see The Unmutual Reviews.


I am so in love with Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man (available online here). It's a work of terrible beauty, not to mention complex and thoughtful themes. It certainly deserves to be remembered as often and with equal appreciation as Frankenstein. The novel supplies my quote for the day:

Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,--shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.

from The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Discovering Sherlock Holmes

Thanks to altariel1 for the heads up:

Stanford Library has organized a project in which participants, at no cost, will receive weekly facsimile installments of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales as they were originally published.

From the website of Discovering Sherlock Holmes:

In 2006, we will rerelease a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of Sherlock Holmes, just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine... Over 12 weeks from January through April 2006, Stanford will be republishing, free of charge, two early Holmes stories, "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Speckled Band"; the nine-part novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles; and the famous "last" encounter between Holmes and Moriarty, "The Final Problem."

Visit Discovering Sherlock Holmes for more information.