Olympic Stadium, east London

Seeing as it’s 2012, this Friday’s photo is of the Olympic Stadium, taken on an insanely hot day last autumn. It’s an impressive structure in the centre of the Olympic Park. Some friends have managed to get tickets for events this summer, so I will have to check with them about what it’s like on the inside.

This is a submission for Photo Friday, a weekly blogging event hosted by Debbie of Delicious Baby.

Samarcande, cover of French edition (Wikipedia)

Last month was a month for re-reading some favourite books. Samarkand, by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, is a book that can stand multiple re-reads. Intricately plotted, it sweeps the reader into a tale of love and passion and poetry against a backdrop of multiple histories of the Middle East.

The book starts as the young Omar Khayyam arrives in Samarkand in the year 1072. He was already renowned as a poet and a sage, which are not always the safest things to be.

The wise Abu Taher gives him a book, and instructions to write down his verses secretly, rather than speak them out loud. And so the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam was born.

Samarkand tells the story of the Rubaiyaat and its tumultuous history, encompassing intrigue at court and the rise of the Assassins. The characters leap off the page: the poetess Jahan, the wily vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the firebrand Hassan Sabbah.

Centuries later, the story of the Rubaiyaat fires the imagination of Benjamin O Lesage, an American researcher. His quest for the manuscript takes him to Persia at the turn of the twentieth century, and it’s a world he is ill-prepared for. Caught up in the giddy atmosphere of revolution, he finds and loses both love and the manuscript.

I first read Samarkand in English, then tackled it in French some years later. This re-read was of the appropriately poetic translation by Russell Harris.

Claude Monet - Woman with a parasol/Wikipedia

She knew she had arrived when she bought her first Monet. No longer the ingénue, the starlet under the thumb of a would-be Svengali, she had finally graduated from forgettable supporting roles to star billing. Her name was now above the title, and she was in a position to pick her own scripts. And buy her own art.

And so it was that she accepted a role in an edgy independent film for next to no money, and headed to London. It showed what she could do and it made her Svengali’s teeth grind, which was always a plus.  And the shoot had coincided with the first auction of impressionist art of the year.

She always did have great timing.

It was a cold, bright day in February, she remembered. She had been warmly wrapped up in coat, hat, and gloves, the very picture of elegance. At the auction house she mingled with the sharply-dressed crowd like she had been hobnobbing with the wealthy all her life. Then she took her seat and composed herself, as she would before a performance. All these years later she could still feel a remnant of the adrenaline that had coursed through her as she imperiously raised her paddle for the first time.

No-one could do imperious quite like her. All the critics said so.

For a moment she had been worried that she wouldn’t succeed. But one by one her rivals fell away and the Monet was all hers.

It would set a pattern for the years to come. Win an award, buy a painting. She had quite the collection, but that first Monet would always have a special place in her affections.

They do say you never forget your first.

I have become enamoured of my kindle, bought last summer in a belated attempt to get digitally savvy. And better prepared for travel. Just think of it – thousands of books, potentially, in one sleek little gadget. I could certainly have done with it when I was in China a couple of years ago. Six months in Hong Kong saw the inevitable accumulation of books that I could not take with me when I moved on to Shanghai, and I had to donate most of them to a second-hand bookshop, The Book Attic, in Wanchai (which has subsequently moved to Central). I dread to think what the excess baggage charge would have been.

Some of those books are not yet available as ebooks, though, and I do miss them. It got me thinking about book collections as a statement: books that say something about their owners, books that chart their owner’s journey. Books that show visitors how interesting, arty, scientific, quirky (insert your adjective of choice) you are. It’s not that easy to do with a kindle.

It’s a thought that was reinforced by my Christmas visit to my family in Italy. My Mum’s book collection has long been a thing of wonder, amassed over decades of travel and unlikely adventures. Perusing its oddities is a favourite activity whenever I stay.

There are books in Italian and English and French; books on Magritte and Degas, Slovenia and Berlin. There are German dictionaries and Italian encyclopaedias, a book on colloquial Arabic and a book devoted to the Spanish subjunctive. There is everyone from Douglas Adams to Stephen King, Umberto Eco to Alessandro Baricco, Thackeray to Dickens, Shakespeare to Maupassant. There are some others I particularly recognise – like Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously, which I bought in Sydney some years ago and has since been recycled through the family. I took advantage of the opportunity for a re-read. See my review here.

The books have been thinned out a bit since my parents’ move but what remains is as eclectic as ever, especially with my brother Max’s international relations books added to the mix.  My contribution includes a book on China’s Terracotta Army and Robert Graves’ Greek Myths.

It was Sherry who first introduced me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for which she can be forgiven much. During my first visit, back when Sherry and Carlo first moved to Friuli, One Hundred Years of Solitude was the only book she had in English, and it became mine for the summer. I’m glad to see it’s still there, distinctly dog-eared now, but well-loved.

Most of my books are currently in storage, awaiting sufficient space (another advantage of the kindle!). I’m looking forward to the day when I can unpack them and set about re-reading some of my favourites. While I’m enthusiastic about the digital revolution in publishing, and the many exciting opportunities it affords for both writers and readers, I remain attached to the dear old dead-tree variety of book. I’ve read a lot of pieces in the blogosphere championing one form or the other, but I think there’s room for both.

Oh boy.

The original challenge, posted on the Kindle forum, was to write 60,000 words during February. Given my commitments this term – two essays and a presentation, and all the library time they will entail – that isn’t a realistic option, but I think spreading it over two months might just be doable. Also, to make it a little easier on myself, the word count will come from a variety of sources: essays, articles, short stories, my book and, of course, blog posts (this one will contribute 400 words to the total).

The good thing is that I have had a lot of cool ideas for stories popping into my head lately, some of which I have started sketching out. And then there’s my book, provisionally titled Smoke and Mirrors, which is, at long last, coming along.

Now comes the tricky bit – getting it all down on paper, or on the screen. As daunting as it seems, this challenge has come at the right time.

I think, at least at the beginning, the hard thing will be getting down to the routine of writing every day. Some days, it’s more about thinking and plotting than actual writing. In order to catch up, I’ll need a few days of concentrated writing from dawn to dusk (just thinking about it is exhausting). I read Zoe Winters’ blog post on writing 10,097 words in one day with amazement – she shows it can be done, but admits it isn’t something she’d want to do every day.

I have my doubts about getting the word count just for the sake of it – at the end of March I would like to have a lot of words, but I’d like them to be good words! My fear with these sorts of challenges is that I would end up just having to redo the vast majority of my work in the edit stage. Hopefully spacing it out over two months will help me steer clear of some of the pitfalls of the word count focused approach.

I’ll keep you posted!