In Focus

It's that time of year (in terms of the Islamic calendar) when I find myself making broad plans for the holy month of Ramadhan, which pretty much coincides with March in 2025 CE. I'd vaguely been thinking about the focus of my reading as the new year came in but it was just yesterday that I realised it was time to reread Ziauddin Sardar's Reading The Qur'an. Apart from a number of fascinating short essays on various aspects of the relevance of the scripture to our contemporary world, Sarder gives a lengthy, close exposition of its longest chapter, Al Baqara, and I need that kind of focus at this point in time. My very keenness to get to grips with his text, manifested in some dipping into its shorter essays today, suggests that paying due attention when I need to won't be too difficult even for an easily distracted reader like myself.

That's a bit of a confession, by the way, the 'distracted' thing. I've been foolishly half-expecting my ability to concentrate to improve simply because I want it to. But if I were commanded to subject myself to a regime of SSR (Sustained Silent Reading), as I've sometimes had occasion to supervise when students have been forced to do it, I don't think I'd do too well. For example, I've read four more of Conan Doyle's tales of the great detective since getting back from the UK and haven't managed to finish one of them in a single sitting. Oh, and I set off on a reading of Antony Beevor's Stalingrad thinking the sheer narrative power of his account of the battle would find me racing through the book at speed only to realise that I'm breaking off after a couple of pages almost every time I pick it up even though it fascinates.

Not sure what happened to the version of me that once felt guilty about reading Stephen King's Tommyknockers over a weekend simply because I couldn't stop myself - and this when I had work I really should have been doing.