Post Degree Show Personal Reward

First of all, big thanks to those who came to our London show!

Everything went well in the end and we had a big fun time.

Again, I was too busy having fun and looking after the bar (aka apologising to all the people there that we only have water or orange juice with a sad look on my face... sorry everyone who came. We really didn't think the drinks would go that quickly..), I forgot to take photos...

Some lovely people said nice things about my work and also we got blogged about quite a bit which makes me happy.

Anyway, I thought it should be time to give myself a reward.

Books books books!!!

Classic reward to myself. My family (especially my dear mummy) was very strict about everything from not leaving food on the plate served to you to never wear clothes with cute characters embroidered but was so generous about books purchases that I never considered the prospect of not buying books I wanted until I was about 20, which is probably a bit too late.

Well it's a reward to myself! so I went on amazon.co.jp and spent about proper 3 hours browsing on and on and on...

Eventually I bought 7 Japanese books I read when I was little and am getting all of them sent here to Brighton! Hooray to the world of international shipping!

This is the first one arrived about a week ago. One of my favourite books of my childhood, "Never Ending Story".

I must have read it when I was about 10 because I remember the thickness of the book was quite challenging when I first read it. But I conquered it within a week and really REALLY loved it. This is exactly the same version (the cover and illustration inside) as the one I read as well which makes things sooooo special. I remember being careful not to damage the beautiful red cover!

I finished reading it last week and it was as good as I remembered, which is very, very good. I'm kind of thankful that I had to go to London every day for a week for the Degree Show preparation so that I could read it every day on the train even though I was very busy.

By the way I've got a mixed feeling about the film Never Ending Story... As a film, it's not bad. But the thing is that I read the book first and the book was soooo good that I was expecting so much from the film. But! the film didn't live up to my expectations... The film is like a badly Photoshopped version of the book even though I have to admit that I had a massive crush on Atreyu. (Also I thought Moon Child was so pretty.)

I've just received another one of the books today. I've just started reading it and again, it's as good as I remembered so far. It's quite a dark story about British origined "Little People" (they're like fairies about the size of a thumb.) living in War-time Japan and a Japanese family who's looking after them. The father of the family gets imprisoned for being anti-war and the older brother of the family becoming militaristic.. wow I'm realising how dark and deep this story is. It's meant to be a children's book though!

I'll probably write about it sometime soon!