Seeking Direction

Am trying to get my reading in some kind of order. I'm approaching the end of Video Night in Kathmandu with just the segments on Thailand and Japan to read. There's much to admire in Iyer's essays, but a certain sameness in terms of the humour of the innocent abroad. And, to be honest, I'm finding the material on the sex trade in Bangkok just a bit depressing. Surely there's more to the city than that.

I suppose that accounts for my picking up the LOA collection of Douglass's Autobiographies ahead of completing the travel book. I'll be reading the third final Life and Times when we travel to KL and have decided not to skip the opening chapters on Douglass as a slave despite the fact that much of the material from My Bondage and My Freedom is repeated verbatim. The power and integrity of the work deserve further close reading. In fact, in reading the two opening chapters I was struck by how moving I found the child's separation from his grandmother, something I'd not managed to feel before for some reason.

Sadly I've been struggling to find the same engagement in Henry Vaughan's religious poetry which I'm admiring from a distance. Some great lines here & there, and general enchantment in the music of the verse, especially through its metrical variety, but the emphasis on the worthlessness of worldly existence gets a bit much. I just don't buy into it, I'm afraid, though I'm pretty sure it's not just posturing in the poet's case.

But I do buy into Jazz: A History of America's Music which I'm enjoying in an extremely leisurely fashion - and have been for quite some time now as very occasional reading, usually just at the weekend. Lovely book; great pictures. But too heavy to take up to Malaysia with us.

And on top of all that, my read-through of Finnegans Wake continues sturdily apace. I don't understand any of it. But in my head it sounds great.

So that's that. A bit of a mess, all told.