Hard Going

Just lately everything I've been reading seems to have a sort of knottiness about it, such that progress in anything has been little more than limpingly slow. It may be old age catching up and slowing the elderly neurons down, of course, but I'd rather blame the books themselves for not jollying me along. The culprits are: One Thousand Roads to Mecca, edited by Michael Wolfe, Auden's The Dyer's Hand, and one of those little books in the Oxford, Very Short Introductions series which are usually so readable in the slipping down sense, except this one isn't, it being Linguistics, A Very Short Introduction by one P. H. Matthews.

In fairness to the culprits, bits of the Auden slip down a treat, it's just that I've been stuck on the two early long pieces on the nature of poetry which are playfully fascinating but tend to boggle the mind if you try and reduce them to some kind of actual sense; and the opening chapters of Prof Matthews deal with some extremely knotty ideas about the nature and origins of language but manage to be quite entertaining along the way. As for Wolfe's compendium of various travellers' accounts of the Haj, you can hardly blame the editor if it takes a little while for the reader to get oriented regarding the particular concerns of each of the chaps involved - and, later on, some ladies - and I've only got as far as Ali Bey Al-Abassi back in 1807, so there's lots to learn about entirely different worlds in time. Mind you, like the Auden it's fascinating stuff and there's really not much point in rushing as there's no where to get to except the place you are.

Having said that, I must shame-facedly confess I've not yet finished the end-of-2013 edition of Philosophy Now (the 'God Issue') and for that I can only blame sheer laziness and lack of manful, mindful, application. I'm trying to read it now, but I'm watching The Voice at the same time which is really not a good idea. (My pick's Josh for the title, but I suspect he's everyone else's pick as well.)