Yes, I have left behind my teenage years, which means that I am no longer the target consumer for Japanese games involving monsters.
I got some lovely presents. The day before my birthday I went to Sydney and treated myself by forking out $AU80 + on books. Prosper Merimee's Carmen and Other Tales, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Zola's la Debacle, Zola's The Masterpiece and Gabriele d'Annunzio's Book of Virgins (an unfortunate reminder of my own dolorous state of purity).
Then, for my birthday, my good friend Peter gave to me three very lovely books; slipcased hardcovers of Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Hesketh Pearson's Smith of Smiths, and a book that I have been wanting for a very long time, the 3 volume boxed set of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, bound in purple cloth!! All books published by The Folio Society, and are very nicely designed.
Now I have to get ready to see a Shark's Tale at the cinema.
<i>'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'</i>
-John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.