Marching In

I found enough time over the weekend to complete Colm Toibin's The Master which ended, hardly surprisingly, just as well as it began. A wonderful sequence involving Henry and William James discussing with Edmund Gosse what they are intending to write for the new century occupies a key section of the final chapter.

The fact that William's book is going to be The Varieties of Religious Experience, surely one of the keystones of serious thought of the last century - and just a great read in anyone's terms - considerably added to my delight.

So now I've made my mind up as to what comes next, trying to avoid picking up something by the Master himself, a great temptation at this point in time. (If I had picked an HJ up it would have been The Portrait of a Lady, sort of by default since everything I've got by him is on the shelves of the house in KL.) It's going to be Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea on the grounds that it's nice and chunky and it's always a treat to let yourself be put under one of her peculiar spells.

I'm also about to read John Clare's March from The Shepherd's Calendar to put some poetry in my life: March month of 'many weathers' wildly comes / In hail and snow and rain and threatning hums… Well we've certainly got the rain today and it's pretty wild out there.