Books and eating babies make me overly excited

Books make me excited. This is why I am an English major. They are going to give me a degree for reading books I generally enjoyed and writing reactions about them. Well, that and successfully deceiving my profes (barely) that I knew something about biology, geography and college algebra. Sometimes I really love university.



I just went to check out a new book from the USAC office and I ran into The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Some of you already know this but this book is one of my top favorites of all time. Seriously. I just wanted to write a blog about how excited I was when I saw they had it. This is so great because they only have about 20 books in English and this one is kinda obscure, I mean, it´s not a library necessity or anything like Harry Potter (of which they have 2 or 3). I was so stoked that I made a big fuss about one of our hardworking USAC ladies reading it as soon as possible. She said she absolutely will after she finishes her current book, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. I read this book during my junior season of vball on our road trip through Idaho and it was one of those that you don´t really care for until you reflect back on it and then you think it was pretty good.



Anyway, what I did end up checking out was The Sun Also Rises because I have decided to go back through Hemingway while I am in Spain. This is the perfect book with which to begin because it was his first major work and he talks about bullfighting which we all just studied intensively for our trip through Andalucía. I´m going to go sit in the study section of the library and read until Lauren gets out of class and we can head for our museum visit.



No more Prado, today it´s the Museo Sorolla to study some more Goya. This museum is supposed to be fantastic. I don´t know what can be better than Goya´s Cuadros Negros (Black Paintings) though, which we viewed in their permanent exhibit in the Prado last week. These are definitely my favorites that we have studied in art history class so far. You should definitely Google them because they are so amazing. Pretty much the devil himself couldn´t have painted creepier/scarier paintings. And the brilliance of this collection is that Goya painted all of these directly onto the walls of his home. No wonder he completely lost it near the end. Anyone would being surrounded by those images constantly.

Below is the Goya version of the same story of Saturn devouring his children. I posted the version by Rubens in a blog entry many moons ago. Notice the subtle differences :) How would you like this staring at you from beside your bed every night? And the beauty is that they´re all pretty grand in scale.



Sun Also Rises time...