Of Parades and Plans

So, I went to London. Not for the first time, no, there has been this love affair between me and the British capital since I was seven years old and visited for the first time, and that was -well, quite a few years ago. I have since returned many times, not so many though as my partner in crime this time, my friend M, who has been to London maybe 25 times. I have some catching up to do to beat her in the number of visits, but I'm sure I'll manage that with time. :)

And what a bookworm does when in London? She goes to Foyles, of course! I spent a lovely afternoon browsing their fiction section, before moving to the history section and back to fiction again and ended up buying four books:
1. Willful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society, Scandal and Romance edited by Ekaterina Sedia and with a forword by Scott Westerfield. (I already read this one and absolutely loved it! I will post a review in a few days.)
2. Affinity Bridge by George Mann. (This is a steampunk mystery and the first in a series.)
3. The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder. (Another steampunk mystery and also the first book in a series. And yes, I'm quite intrigued by steampunk novels at the moment.)
4. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. (I read this in Finnish back in 2009, but they had signed copies at Foyles, so of course I had to buy one! :))

I also bought some dvd:s at HMV including two seasons of the 1970s hit show The Bionic Woman and got a bit crazy at Desigual (I loove their clothes and bags!), but my excuse is that they had a sale and a girl never has enough bags -or lovely shirts with butterfly patterns in them!:)

One of the highlights of my trip was a visit to The British Library to see The Mughal India exhibition. It was simply wonderful! Beautiful artifacts, beautiful books and book art, interesting history. In one word: perfect!

At New Year's Eve we did what (according to The Times the next day) hundreads of thousands of others did and went to see the fireworks. Unfortunately we did not get a very good place to watch and did not see much. I was surprised that there were so little fireworks, almost only the official show, but I guess it must be forbidden to use them elsewhere.

January 1st we went to see the New Year's Parade. That was fun and this time we found a very good place to watch. I also managed to take quite a few photos of the parade.

All in all it was a lovely trip. And it was very nice to spend a few days somewhere where there was no snow! There was some rain, but hey that's London :), and mostly the weather was nice, temperatures up to double digits and there was even some sunshine.

Now I'm back home and Sunday will be the last day of my two week vacation. It's back to work on Monday. These few days after returning from London I have been very busy reading :), but I have also pondered a little on what my reading goals for 2013 will be. I would like to join some challenges, but taken my previous total fails with many of the challenges I had joined, I'm in no hurry to choose any just yet. I feel I want to be as free as a bird with my reading and don't want to bind myself to any strict plans. I am reading for fun after all!

What I would like to do in 2013 is:
- to continue reading Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries in chronological order (I read the first one last year (and just noticed that I had forgotten to include it to my list of books read in 2012!). This is a personal challenge with no time limit.)
- to continue reading books with LGBT themes (This is another personal challenge. Last year my goal was 10 books. Let's make it 15 this year.)
- to read a good number of e-books (I only started reading e-books during the latter half of 2012, but now that I have an iPad I really love using it to read books and most probably the number of e-books I will read this year is going to be quite high.)
- to read more steampunk and fantasy novels (As I already mentioned I'm really into steampunk novels at the moment, but I would also like to broaden my knowledge of fantasy. I've never been a huge fan of classical fantasy novels, but some of the books or stories with fantasy elements I've read recently have really piqued my interest.)

Here's a few touristy photos I took in London. The park is St. James Park, my favorite park in London, because of all the birds and squirrels! :) The last few photos are from the New Year's Parade. I hope you like them! :)