I’m sorry. Really, I am. Like the charming Finslippy, the longer I neglect you, the stronger my feeling that I need to give you something marvellous, or at least hilarious, to make up for it, and the angstier the nail-biting. And yet I am quite happy to read anything at all on my pals’ blogs, essays, rants, snippets that amused them, complaints about being bored.
The thing is, the thing IS, you see, the people at work actually do expect me to actually work, rather than sit about mulling over the Novel and wondering what to bore you lot with this week. It is monstrously unfair of them. [Though how this applies to all the time you spend at home surfing the net or watching CSI or, God help us, both at once, I don't know - Ed].
Anyway. [Have you noticed how she always ignores me when I'm right?]
ANYWAY. It doesn’t help that I’m a little absent-minded at the best of times.
I particularly like knowing what people are reading at the moment, especially when they are reading more than one book at a time – the juxtapositions are often so interesting and such great scope for feverish speculation. And as I am not a hypocrite, oh no, really, I’m not, here’s my current bedside book-pile:
- Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand – (which is out of print. For why?) slow going, and not at a point where I can formulate fair or coherent opinions. [And don't you go hoping she'll get back to you on this. Bone idle and absent minded, remember?]
- HG Wells’ Selected Short Stories (inc. The Time Machine). I don’t remember having ever actually read The Time Machine before (not that that precludes one from pontificating on it). The Time Machine is a giant of mythopoeia and yet is such a very short novella. Surprising. And I was, I think, more struck with the vision of London as a valley full of trees and stately ruins than with Wells’ now rather silly prediction of humanity splitting into two etiolated and bleached races, the pretty and pretty stupid, and the vile and viley predatory. Nowadays, of course, we know very well we are splitting into the skeletal and the fleshy, neither type will be able to reproduce, and the whole sorry boiling will come to an abrupt stop in three generations. London will still become a forest full of stately ruins. Oh, and crisp-packets. Unless they evolve a natural predator.
- Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, third time of asking. Which says a lot. And I am reading for the third time because I AM preparing a review, and the Editor can go and stick her head argh grr [Do you want control of the keyboard back? Just nod].
- Boris Akunin’s The Death of Achilles. Because a) it’s research and b) I cannot be clever all the time [Well then, half the time? A third of the time? Oh, go on, I dare you]
And, as ever, Big Thoughts are being Thunk regarding The Novel [I say Navel]. I confess I am being a little dilatory and pathetic about this. But, you know, so much fretting, so little time.
