Stop-Start

My reading just lately has been possessed of this disconcerting staccato quality: little jerks of progress with dead periods between. It took me quite a while to read Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life despite finding so much that was interesting about it, not least the details about France generally in the Occupation and that nation's immediate post-war experience of trying to come to terms with the period. I'm wondering now whether it was the engaging nature of the material that found me moving so slowly through it.

In tandem with the biography, which I finished a few days back, I was reading Richard Adams Watership Down, having retrieved every one's favourite book of talking rabbits from Fifi, who seemed to find it impossible to read despite Uncle Brian's encouragement to do so. I extend this encouragement to readers young and old who haven't read Adams's masterpiece. It's just a great story. Unfortunately on this my second reading the fact that I know the story so well has slowed my reading and I'm still at it. What I've gained this time round, some forty years later, is a greater appreciation of the fact that this is much more a story about human behaviour (in rabbit clothing) than it is about actual rabbits. I used to tell people that the only thing that isn't natural about rabbit behaviour in the novel is the fact they have language, but I failed to appreciate just how cleverly the writer deceives us in this respect. There's a great deal that touches on the implausible. Mind you, the reader still gets to learn an awful lot about rabbits and, more importantly, extends his or her awareness of those who share our world.

I can't see myself starting anything else in a serious manner until I've bid farewell to Hazel and his companions since it's my faffing around dipping into other books that's partly responsible for slowing me down. I'm putting off a proper reading of The From Hell Companion until I have time to read it alongside the original. Good as it is it doesn't stand alone, and doesn't pretend to. The pile of Library of America tomes recently delivered has also been playing havoc with sustained progress on 'real' reading as I haven't been able to resist dipping into every volume for just a few pages - and it hasn't helped that I've even been going back to the Flannery O'Connor LoA volume to reread a story or two in The Geranium segment of the earliest of her stories.

The oddest thing of all is that just lately I've had no impulse to seriously get on with reading a collection or two of poems. I'm not at all sure why this is - it just is. Oh hum. Anyway, I'm off back with those clever bunnies. Bigwig's just about to break out of General Woundwort's creepy warren with a bunch of does and I'm looking forward to find out what happens next, even though I already know.