Partly I blame Niall Ferguson and Economics, though not necessarily in that order. You see at the centre of my reading has been The Pity of War, but the early chapters are dense with economic data and I have struggled. At the same time the insights gained made the struggles worthwhile and once beyond the opening third of the book I found everything else much easier going. But whilst initially labouring I couldn't resist starting a number of other projects.
I mentioned already here, a few days back, the read-through I've embarked on of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is proving highly rewarding and since I'm very keen indeed to get to the prose which comprises the second part of the Oxford edition I'm using, I can't see this being abandoned. And then there's the Shakespeare sonnets project I embarked on last year, but which fizzled out when we had to look after Afnan for a month. You try a close reading of the Bard at his most dense when there's a nipper demanding your attention on the kitchen floor and you'll see what I mean.
Actually I lost count of where I was up to. I think I'd got to around Sonnet 32 (according to a blog entry made at the time) but since I honestly couldn't remember it seemed best to start all over again. The project, by the way, consists of reading a sonnet in the Penguin edition alongside John Kerrigan's excellent notes, then switching to Don Paterson's wonderfully un-academic commentary Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, and then back to a final reading. I'm now up to Sonnet 22 and this time won't be stopped.
But in addition to all this I've sort of accidentally found myself reading Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. We're adopting this as a text at work next year and a colleague unexpectedly gave me a copy making me feel obliged to do the necessary. I make this sound like an imposition, but delightfully, of course, it's not, one of the perks of this job being forced to read stuff you don't need to be forced to read. I finished the first couple of stories and enjoyed them - in fact, the first, about a couple divorcing, struck me as very powerful indeed within its limits.
And I'm afraid that's not all. A visit yesterday afternoon to the little second hand bookshop at Holland Village resulted in the acquisition of a good murder by Val McDermid. It's entitled The Distant Echo and I suppose might be regarded as a guilty pleasure would that I was capable of any kind of guilt regarding what I read. And when I tell you I also picked up the latest edition of Philosophy Now to place alongside an issue of The New York Review of Books (one-third read), an issue of The London Review of Books (even less read) and a facsimile issue of the first ever NYRB - which came free with the current one I haven't read yet - you'll understand my dilemma.
Oh, and I'm dying to start at least one of the poetry books I picked up the other day, and am holding back on The Swamp Thing until we get to KL where I traditionally let it all hang out in graphic mode. And I've just realised that this post is a celebration rather than a lament. So there.
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