Reading Myself

Spent a bit of time today reflecting on the vagaries of my reading over the last two or three months. For reasons I can't quite grasp I failed to make the progress I expected to on the small pile of books I assembled back in early May. I thought that in our June sojourn at Maison KL I'd get to grips with all the novels, but this wasn't to be. It isn't that I stopped reading, but once I'd finished Dune I really had to force myself to make progress in The Battle for Spain. It wasn't that I was bored. I just found I needed to take things slowly to ensure I did justice to all the detail. And, I felt compelled, in a mild sort of way, to goof off on stuff on-line which felt then, and now, tissue thin, not like 'real' reading at all.

Oddly enough I didn't listen to much music either, and this despite having quite a bit of time on my hands.

In contrast, the last few days have seen me banging along with a few texts, and feeling compelled to do so despite having plenty of work to get through. I've picked up the pace on the big Lowell Collected and just finished the poems in his last substantial book, Day by Day - which I found pretty accessible in terms of his late period. The first three stories in Ted Chiang's collection proved distinctly engaging and I'm settling into Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet with relish. And I should add that I've been enjoying a paragraph from Finnegans Wake here and there on a regular basis for the last week and found myself zipping through a number of reviews over the weekend in the Christmas Double Issue of the Literary Review which I'd put to one side after mid-May despite very much enjoying to that point.

So why the sudden enthusiasm? I wish I knew; I remain a mystery to myself. But here's an awkward thought: Perhaps I need to be forced into action (needing to work) in order to feel a compulsion to read in order to create for myself a space for myself. If the time is gifted me, I lose something. An essential laziness asserts itself and I lose whatever sense of purpose I've got. I'm not sure I've read myself correctly, but if I have there are implications to deal with.