Chapter 24: I'm Back :)

My apologies for disappearing into thin air and not even posting about, well, the fact that I would not be posting for a while. I had a very good and happy reason, though, as you'll see in the end of this post, so I hope you'll forgive me. :)

But first a bit of book news: The annual Helsinki Book Fair took place in the Helsinki Exhibition and Convention Centre 22.-25.10. It is the biggest book fair in Finland and this year almost 77000 people visited the fair. That is more visitors than ever before! Every year there is special focus on one country. This year the country featured was Sweden, next year it will be France. A few years ago it was Britain and one of the writers visiting the fair then was Sarah Waters, who is one of my favorite authors. I was lucky enough to have her sign my copy of Fingersmith for me! This year the visiting writers included, in addition to several Swedish authors, American Karin Slaughter and Scottish Hal Duncan, whose book Vellum has just been translated into Finnish. I heard Duncan speak about his book. Here's a picture I took of him:

Our library is situated just across the street from the Exhibition and Convention Centre. So it is always very convenient to visit the book fair. I left work a bit earlier on Friday and spent the next almost 4 hours at the book fair. There are always also many second hand booksellers present and I especially love to browse their stands. This year I ended up buying a 1948 edition of Mika Waltari's Mikael Karvajalka (Michael the Finn/The Adventurer). I also managed to get some nice additions to my bookmark collection:
And now to the reason I have not been blogging lately. I don't remember whether I have written anything about my dancing on A Book Blog of One's Own before. I have been dancing more or less my whole life, first ballet, and then since my teens standard and latin american dances. I work in the library, but dancing is definitely a bit more that just a hobby for me. Two years ago I and my dance partner won the Finnish Senior 10 Dance Championships for the first time. Last year we won again. These past few weeks I was not only very busy with work, but also preparing for this year's championships. The 2009 Finnish 10-Dance Championships took place here in Helsinki last Saturday and I am so very, very happy to be able to tell you that we managed to win the senior class for the third time in a row!:) Below is a picture of us after the competition.