Reading, Again

I've not been terribly pleased with myself lately regarding what I've been reading. I'd planned to read Pickthall's translation of The Holy Qur'an in Ramadhan but only managed about a third of the text. And similarly I read only the first half of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's essays on Islamic Life and Thought. This was not, I hasten to explain, due to any lack of enthusiasm. I simply enjoyed the slow pace of repetitive ruminative reading - almost a kind of meditation at times.

This reading had cut across my on-going ordinary reading, but, to be honest, I wasn't really seriously getting on with much of anything when fasting month began. As the month ended I found myself having a poetical good time, as I explained the other day, and have only read one substantial thing else, which was a re-read which left me feeling almost as if it didn't count.

That book, by the way, was Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or The Murder at Road Hill House, and I have to tell you that good as it was the first time around it actually gets better on a second reading. When you know the ending, Ms Summerscale's utterly convincing solution, everything is seen, or rather read, in a new and illuminating light. The final chapters, dealing with the fates of various of the people involved one way and another in the murder, become powerfully moving in terms of the kind of redemption they seem to illustrate. So a good one to read on days when forgiveness was paramount.

But now it's time to make a list.