GIP (gratuitous icon post)

Most of you know I hate having my photo taken. When confronted with a camera, my face produces these awful rictus-like expressions and it always looks (to me) as if I'm pulling a face, or about to snap and kill the camera-wielder (although of course, both of those things could be true anyway).

At Frances' birthday party, protected by a mask, over the moon with my hair colour, and happy with the mask-ribbons-hair-frock combination, I didn't hide when people started taking photos, and last night I was handed one of the results. I'm still not entirely happy with the way I look in the photo, but there's very little of me, and lots of my hair, my mask and my frock, so new icons ahoy!

Luxury

My next course will be 'Contemporary Writing', and I have the luxury of having the reading list now instead of two weeks into the course, as I did last time, so hopefully I'll be able to have a life in between essays next term.

The books I will be reading in a leisurely way over the summer are:

• White Teeth (which I've read before, enjoyed, and was meaning to re-read since seeing the TV adaptation, which I thought was very good)
• Austerlitz
• Trumpet
• Shopping and Fucking (which Amazon, rather sweetly, calls 'Shopping and F***ing')
• Paul Muldoon's Poems 1968-1998
• Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003

Amazon must love me ;-)

If anyone knows any of these authors/books, I'd be interested to hear what you think. Apart from Zadie Smith, and a vague recollection of outrage at S&F, they're all an unknown quantity to me.