Tales from Midweek

A mini book haul update: I ventured to have lunch at a favourite secondhand bookshop today – I’ve not gone bonkers, they have a cafe downstairs and the bookshop and seating upstairs. It’s an awesome place.

Anyway, I meant to only pick up one book that I spotted on their website but – surprise – also ended up with a few others.

I’ve been looking for The Lion and the Unicorn for quite some time, so when I saw that Books & Beans had a copy in very good condition, I could not say no.

And obviously, self-restraint took a day off today, so I also adopted two MacInnes thrillers and, finally (!), Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus. I guess I got tired of waiting to find a recommendation for a translation that didn’t suck and went with the original 1949 translation by H.M. Parshley. I guess it’s as good a place to start as any.

Oh, and as this is a birthday book haul, I should also add a picture of this:

It’s a rhubarb cake. My friends gave me some rhubarb from their garden so I used mt time off work productively yesterday and tried a new cake recipe.

The original recipe is this but I had to change it because the amount of butter and sugar were too much for my liking…and I also added rhubarb to the cake mixture and not just as topping. Btw, I was right to cut the butter and sugar proportions. And adding pieces of rhubarb to the cake part made sure the sponge part was lush.