On A Roll

Still hugely enjoying David Cairns's Mozart And His Operas to the extent that I'm deliberately dragging it out a bit. It helps that it's packed with information and needs to be savoured. It's obviously the kind of book that you go back to as a reference, when listening to a particular opera, as well as providing an excellent through-read.

But in the meantime I've been dashing through a fair amount of fiction: following Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I finished at the weekend, I've also completed David Lodge's Deaf Sentence and Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and am now a fair way into Banville's The Book Of Evidence. It certainly helps when the marking is out of the way.

It's a curious thing that whilst a fair number of my generation find much to complain about culturally I see us as living in a golden age for poetry and prose and music (of all kinds.)