Currently reading

City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire
Roger Crowley
Progress: 605/823 pages
A History of Venice
Peter Dimock, John Julius Norwich

Who, me?

Why Ana Bela?

 

It's a spur-on the-moment pun. My name is Anna, or Ana in the languages that don't use double letters, Serbian being one. As I've been introduced to the country grandmother of one of my Serbian friends, she immediately expressed her appreciation of my exotic (for Mediterraneans) looks: "Shto si plava! Shto si bela!" (so fair! so white! (skinned)) And no, I'm not an Albino :)

 

What do I read?

 

That depends on the phase I find myself in. As a kid I read all I could find lying about at home and in the library - adventure, classics, fantasy, sci-fi, popular science.

 

I studied languages and literature at the university, and every semester we had a huge reading list for our curriculum. Besides, I read stuff like that

http://anabela.booklikes.com/post/723245/the-reading-list-of-a-melancholy-teenage-music-lover

for my own pleasure (not that I didn't like what we had to read for class, I did, but a girl gotta have a hobby).

So it's not surprising that I got seriously overloaded by serious fiction, especially the 20th century pervertive-depressive kind and have not read such a book since graduation. I do still read authors like Antonia Byatt or Donna Tartt, otherwise modern literary fiction is just not my cup of tea anymore though I can talk about it, having absorbed so much. Classics are fine.

 

Nowadays I read mostly historical non-fiction, historical fiction including mysteries and romances,spanning from European Middle Ages to the turn of the 20 C. My favourite periods are fifteenth and the long eighteenth centuries.

 

To stay somewhat anchored in the modern world I read urban fantasy, LOL. I can wax philosophical on the topics raised by UF writers so all that existentialist training hasn't been in vain.Heroic fantasy and sci-fi I'm not that intersted in (probably read too much of both when I was a kid while UF is a relatively new genre). I've always been fascinated by dystopian worlds and remain so.

 

My other passion is early music. I play it and yes, read about it - both non-fiction and the rare fiction that I can find.

 

No idea what I'll be reading in 20 years, but one thing is for sure - be reading I will!

 

Who's that guy on the avatar?

 

It's Jean-Baptiste Lully, French composer, dancer, courtier and businessman, as played by the actor Boris Terral. In real life Lully wasn't half as pretty, not that he cared.