Back On Track

I've felt oddly discombobulated over the last three months with regard to what I've been reading. It's particularly odd since I've enjoyed everything one way or another yet had to wrestle with a sense that I should have been reading something else, as if I've been somehow sidetracked. I suppose this might relate to the line of books on my top shelf waiting, rather deliciously, for my attention - these being the tomes purchased last year with the money my employers set aside with which I'm supposed to improve myself. Oh, and the equally enticing pile on my shelves at work that constitute the new course which we devised for the Year 5 class I'm teaching.

Anyway I finally feel I'm getting somewhere, though where that somewhere is I have no real idea, in that I finally got to open Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder (one of the (very) few books I purchased in Manchester on our December jaunt), which I'm reading in tandem with Anna Karenina.

But what's this? you cry. I thought you'd binged on the Tolstoy in very recent memory!? Yes, indeed. About a year or so ago. But that was before I knew that the good (or bad) lady was going to be the centre of attention in my classroom for the early part of next term. So I'm back for more, like the moth drawn to the flame. Now I know just how Vronsky felt, eh?

Having said that, the good news is that Holmes's 'romantic scientists' are giving her quite a run for her money. Joseph Banks has just left Tahiti in Chapter 1 and I suspect memories of that memorable visit will stay with me for a long time.