Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, by Helen Fielding

Acting on a tip-off from Kate John's blog, I picked up Olivia Joules yesterday in the library (see my other blog for library-related ponderings). It's a good job I didn't have anything important to do today, cos guess what: I've already finished it. I wonder if this book brings on a pyjama-day in every female who reads it? I've never read anything by Helen Fielding before (frankly I think I was put off by Renee Zellweger's perpetual I'm-eating-a-lemon face) but I was really pleasantly surprised by Olivia Joules. It is fluff, but it's well-written fluff, and I'm all up for that on an idle weekend.

Andrew Lang's Fairy Books

I absolutely love fairy tales, of all shapes and sizes. I’d been really hankering after them and one evening over a cup of tea I even got my mum to retell me one of her mother’s stories which she used to tell me at night time (it sounds extra good in Polish). She then told me about a series of books which she had read as a girl: some chap called Andrew Lang began, in 1889, to collect fairy tales from cultures far and wide, and he put them together in The Blue Fairy Book, which was closely followed by The Red Fairy Book, and so on until he finished eleven years later with The Lilac Fairy Book. I wasted no time. Within a week the library had dug six of these colourful collections out of storage for me and for many a happy night I read myself a story or two before turning out the light (sometimes aloud to practice the voices). They're pretty ancient books, too, so the pages are lovely and yellowing and smell just they way they ought to.