Even when I wrote that's that towards the end of yesterday's post I was half aware that that wasn't really that at all. I'd failed to mention anything about my most recent purchase from Kinokuniya, that being Conrad's novel Victory, one of the bigger gaps in my reading. And I really should have said something about the biggest gap of all: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. So embarrassing not to have read the major work by one of my favourite novelists, and I can't honestly explain the gap, except to say I've perused so many of the key sections in excerpts it's as if I know the book already. I very nearly purchased a copy along with the Conrad but then hesitated over which translation to go with. And I've still not really settled that question despite having looked at quite a bit of the debate about current translations on-line. My plan is to buy a copy from the Kinokuniya at KLCC once we've settled into the house, and I've made inroads into the Douglass autobiography and Victory, which I'm starting on this evening.
Plus I was seriously wondering about picking up a recent Stephen King novel from the library at work when I suddenly realised that I had on my desk a brand new copy of Achebe's Things Fall Apart which I'm supposed to be teaching in the first term next year. It struck me that the King was likely to prove surplus to requirements in our time in KL given the pile I'd built up.
The thing is that I want to read all these titles at once. It's a kind of greed, I suppose. At some point I failed to develop an adult sense of self-control with regard to my reading. And it's not getting better with time.
No comments:
Post a Comment