The nostrils of the poet

The cinnamon has, unfortunately, no smell at all, but to the nostrils of the poet.

- The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, on Robert Percival's An Account of the Island of Ceylon (etc.)

Facebooks - II

Because Tuesday's child is also full of books.

--

Leonard Woolf: A Life - Victoria Glendinning
The Enthusiast Field Guide to Poetry - ed. The Enthusiast (Ian Sansom     and others)
An Historical Relation of Ceylon... (etc.) - Robert Knox
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Iliad - Homer
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Shah of Shahs - Ryszard Kapuściński
The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Collected Short Stories - Roald Dahl
The Libertine - Stephen Jeffreys

On the lecture circuit

American literature is fine, but I feel it to be an irrelevance in a disaster area.

- Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Books I've actually finished lately: 9

Etymological smack-down!

On the naming of Batticaloa:

It has much rice, principally in a district that lies on the side of the island that faces the east, called Calou, that is "kingdom," by reason of which rice, which they call bate, the kingdom is called Batecalou, which they interpret as the "kingdom of rice" [4].

- Joao De Barros, The history of Ceylon: From the earliest times to 1600 AD

That said:

[4] This is one of the most amusing of Barros's etymological atrocities. Of course, Sinh. bat is boiled rice; and neither in Sinh. nor in Tam. is there a word like calou meaning "kingdom."

- Donald Ferguson, Barros's translator and editor

Errata - or; How it is Done

Page 1. Line 16. after Parts, strike out the comma...

- Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies: Together With an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen now living there, and of the Author's Miraculous Escape

[Note to editors: This page of minor corrections is at the front of the first edition.]