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Weekly Monday Round-up (November 21, 2016)


It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at the Book Date and is "a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week."

Visit the Book Date to see what various other book bloggers have been up to in the past week.




Books I finished reading last week: 
  • Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann. Historical novel. I'm working on a review.
  • Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Fantasy police procedural, set in modern London. I'm working on a review.
  • What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem by E.S. Turner. This is an informative account of life in service in England (and America) and a look at the upstairs-downstairs dichotomy. 

Books I acquired last week:


I will discuss them in more detail later in the week.


Weather report: 
We had the first frost in the Reykjavík area last week, with a little snow, which then melted and re-froze. The slippery pavements are preventing me from walking at my usual speed on my daily walks. Instead I am sort of shuffling along, trying to stay on my feet. If this keeps up I will either have to lengthen my walks from 5 km to 7 km a day to get in the same exercise, or join a gym so I can use a treadmill. Or maybe I'll start swimming instead. The hot pools here are a lovely, lovely way to end an hour of exercise.

Other things I did last week:
A meringue so shiny it looks like a blob of mayonnaise.
Baked sugar-free meringues. I'm diabetic and therefore sugar is EVIL and I wanted to try a recipe I found for sugarless meringues, using sucralose (Splenda). They were the whitest, shiniest meringues I have ever seen, but tasted horrible, metallic and nasty, and ended up in the trash. Next I'm trying with erythritol, which has less of an after-taste.



Ordered three books from the  Book Depository - the follow-up to Rivers of London and a later book in the series that was on sale, and a hardcover edition of the Science of Discworld IV. I figured it might not be available in hard covers for much longer and since my copies of volumes I-III are all in hard covers I decided this one had better be as well.

Ordered two new pairs of eyeglasses. My eyesight finally seems to have stabilised after getting messed up by the diabetes and I decided to order one pair of progressives and another single vision pair to use as sunglasses.

Booked a flight to Frankfurt, Germany for a long weekend in December. I'm taking my mother with me and we are driving to Heidelberg and staying there and going to the Christmas market.

Comments

Beth F said…
Here's hoping your eyes stabilize. We had snow here in Pennsylvania (USA), so I'm surprised you had frost. Your trip to Germany sounds lovely.
Bibliophile said…
Beth, it wasn't much of a frost, just enough to make everything nice and slippery when it thawed and froze again. It usually freezes considerably sooner than this and in fact we have had a record 200 frost-free days in a row this year.
Anonymous said…
That's too bad about your meringues! I am jealous of your planned trip to Germany.
Greg said…
Rivers of London has me curious because I've been trying more urban fantasy and that series keeps popping up. It looks good. And What The Butler Saw sounds interesting to me as well, ever since seeing Gosford Park I've been kind of interested in that.

We got a little snow and some frost too, definitely getting colder. Enjoy your upcoming trip, the Christmas market sounds wonderful!

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