Sunday in Oxford

[louiselux]

We went to Oxford yesterday, partly to mooch about the bookshops, partly to go to the botanical gardens. It's 20 minutes on the train from Reading, which seemed the perfect travelling distance.

So we mooched a lot and found a new second hand bookshop, where I scored heavily in quality if not in quantity: one copy of Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by my old friends Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally. It's their follow up, many years later, to In Search of Dracula




An art installation in the grounds of what was the old gaol and is now a branch of the up market hotel Malmaison (Bad House, fittingly). The junk furniture is apparently arrayed to imitate the layout of the old cells.



Nice book shop near Oxford Castle, stuffed full of genre fiction, run by a very nice man who told me it was his dream to run such a shop. He was a part time heating engineer too and had blueprints spread out on his desk - multitasking to make ends meet. He was great.



My book yay!



Dramatic iris is dramatic at the botanical gardens



There was a patch of bobble-headed alliums surrounding huge silvery artichokes



A huge crumpled leaf



My decision-making story die, 50p each from Borders. I haven't had any decision making crises yet, but am looking forward to having one soon.



Lemon muffin, omg. It was delicious with a latte.



Portrait in a bin - Matt is next to me, reading Patrick O'Brian, and I am reading my new book and taking photos.



My feets, randomly. I'm chucking these plimsolls soon, because it is now impossible to stop them smelling bad.



Cherry beer on the way home and more healthy water. The wee bag is an incredibly useful present from i_am_zan - a tiny insulated cool bag, with a tag that says 'lube sheep' on it. I use it fortaking my milk and probiotic yoghurt drinks to work

Comments

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

have you read the tom holland vampire books, I stopped about six years ago so there is probably another ten since then but they're based around the most wonderful conceit
lord byron's diary was burned because he was a vampire
the first one is a bit of a literary joke, it's what if Polidori was right and Byron was a vampire, the second is stoker investigating the mystery around Lucy Ruthven and other mysterious deaths around his theatre
the third is Lord Rochester and the settling of america, and has a rather interesting thought on the plague and has the main character with milton trying to decipher the voynich manuscript, and the fourth is ancient egypt and suggests Nefertiti was a vampire

they're great because they're really well researched, Tom holland is a literary scholar first so he knows his stuff, even little details
like vampire polidori's breath smells because he drank acid, and the second one has vampires in the raj with proper Kali worship, it starts as rudyard kipling, goes to sherlock holmes and ends up more robert louis stevenson and it's deliberate.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks! That sounds really good, especially the taking it across diffrent cultures.

I think I have actually perused this in Watestones recently. It does sound right up my street.