The Odd Bunch

Now reading Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in the handsome Library of America edition, which includes Walden and a couple of other pieces. Actually I bought it for Walden, a classic I've never read cover to cover, but started on A Week as it's the first thing in the collection. Relaxing stuff so far. A reminder of a better age.

I love the LoA editions, of course, but it was odd finishing Ubik in the Philip K. Dick collection the other week as I can't help but feel that Dick should be read in cheap paperbacks. I don't mean this in an insulting way, far from it. Cheap paperbacks often feature fine works, as in the case of Dick, and the raw vigour of his novels seem better suited to them somehow.

Ubik was part of my scheduled holiday reading which, other than the stuff I've already blogged about, also included Ackroyd's nifty, and delightfully demotic, 'translation' of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Heaney's The Spirit Level, Beckett's Waiting For Godot and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex (in Don Taylor's translation). The last two are texts I am teaching later in the year, but I'm happy to say that I was reading them purely and wonderfully for pleasure. All in all, a fruitful list, I think, if a slightly odd bunch.