Reading List

The momentum of my reading has slowed now that work has started in earnest. I have one or two things to finish that I had hoped to complete before the new year, viz, the great-sonnet-read-through (though the point here is not to rush) and Irving's Tales of the Alhambra. The tales are lightweight fun and I rushed through the first half on the way back from Spain, but it's not the sort of collection that compels reading. I have a sense now of unfinished business about the book, though, and really must push on.

As a further result of our holiday experiences I picked up my very old copy of Don Quixote from KL (the Penguin Classics translation by J.M. Cohen) intending this to be my first long, lingering read of the year. However, I've only managed a couple of chapters so far. The last time I read this was when I was seventeen and waiting to go to university. It was on the preliminary reading list for my lit course. Oddly enough four decades on I'm finding myself responding in pretty much the same way so far as I did as a teenager. I say this is odd as I'm aware that for many texts my responses now are so different than they were then that it can feel as if I'm reading an entirely different work. But Quixote seems timelessly consistent.

I also made a couple of purchases when we were in KL. Now I know you're going to say that you thought I'd sort of vowed not to buy any more books (at least for a considerable time) but the purchase of one of these was entirely unavoidable. I first spotted Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living by Declan Kiberd over a year ago and thought then that it sounded special, so special that it had to find a place on my shelves. Actually though it's a worthwhile read (I'm about halfway through) it's not quite as unusual as its publicity makes it out to be: An audacious and accessible new take on one of the central books of the twentieth century. The central claim is that Joyce writes for everyone and Ulysses is above all worth reading for its humane wisdom. This is, of course, entirely correct, but Kiberd still falls into the dreary discourse of lit crit too often for my complete liking - not surprisingly as he is a lit prof, poor fellow. What's required is for someone outside academia to write the guide that this guide could have been. The other purchase was a little book on Linguistics which I haven't got round to at all yet.

And, finally, I've read a couple of chapters of a second-hand copy of Robert Harris's Pompeii which looks as if it's going to be as good as his other Roman novel about Cicero, the title of which escapes me. And now for a bit of actual reading, but where to start? It's nice to be spoilt for choice.