Pastures New

I'm finding myself really bothered by the painful lack of progress, or substance, or whatever, in my reading over the last couple of months. I had intended to mention that I was still moving steadily through the wonderful Collected Causley the other day, when it occurred to me that I embarked on my read-through over a year ago, so that wasn't much of a defence.

Having put down the Diamond I picked up my American Library Thoreau, the one with Walden in it, and that was going to be my reading for the month ahead. Again, rather embarrassingly I made a false start on Walden not so long ago, further evidence of my lack of application in the one area I'm supposed to maintain as evidence of a life of the mind.

So I took advantage of a visit to Holland Village in the late afternoon with Noi to pop into the second hand bookshop there in search of something trashy but good, if you see what I mean. I reckon this is the roughage that's been missing from my reading diet for quite a while, ever since I got quite puritanical about buying books and ensuring I finished everything actually already on my shelves. I came away with the first of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels and a dirt cheap biography of Tolstoy - the one by Aylmer Maude - which I'd been thinking of getting and reading ahead of teaching Anna Karenina this year, just for the fun of it really since it's well out of date.

The odd thing was that with a couple of cheap paperbacks in my bag I suddenly felt a whole lot better, and even more so when I read the opening of Faceless Killers, the Wallander novel, and found myself at the mercy of the narrative.