The Plan

Looking back to June, and what I managed to read after the ferocity of my working life had calmed somewhat, I suppose I feel a bit disappointed by my general lack of endeavour. Other than the stuff mentioned in earlier posts around that period I read precious little else: the three earliest Rebus novels by Ian Rankin, Ricks's TS Eliot and Prejudice (this after completing Milton's Grand Style), and, on the poetry front, Alice Oswald's Falling Awake. In addition I sort of started Andrew Motion's biography of Keats (aptly entitled Keats, for all you connoisseurs of pithy titles out there), Iain McGilchrist's book about the divided brain The Master and his Emissary, (the full title of which is, not so pithily, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World) and Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, (which whilst lacking something in terms of pith makes up for it in terms of descriptive vigour.)

Now you may think that I found something lacking in these three to make me temporarily give up on them. The truth is, though, that I was gripped enough by each to decide I wasn't doing them any justice reading them alongside other matter, and that's why they were put aside. Today I resumed Motion's fine biography from where I left off, with the great Romantic about to pen Endymion, and it felt like I'd never put it down. In contrast, I decided to restart McGilchrist's densely argued tome, of which I'd read the Introduction and the first couple of chapters, and was glad I did as I achieved a greater degree of clarity regarding his thesis on a second reading.

And it's these two books that as of now officially constitute my current reading. (Of course I'm dying to get going again on the Schubert book and there's a fair bit of other reading matter clamouring for my attention but I'm holding firm to just these for the time being.)