Sunday 28 November 2010

BAD blogger!

What sort of person starts a blog, tails off posting, resumes with one slushy post and a promise to stop being slushy, and then just disappears?
I'm feeling particularly distressed by how few books I've logged recently, for which I think there are two reasons: I've not been reading that much, with the wedding and other things, and I seem to have a number of pretty chunky books on the go, meaning that I'm not doing much completer-finishing.
I could tell you about
52 Confessions of a conjuror, Derren Brown's latest, or 53 Making babies: stumbling towards motherhood, Anne Enright writing autobiography much better than she writes fiction (in my view), or I could carry on with War and Peace, which already has a number but isn't going to be finished any time soon, or I could get down to it and finish 54 The Assassin's Cloak which is a glorious, and huge, anthology of diary extracts, and 55 Mothers alone, another 60s pelican on social policy which is just the right combination of sobering and absorbing.
So, I promise I will, when I have, and in the mean time let me point out that now my numbers are over 52 I have at least managed an average of a book a week for the year, even if I've failed to live up to my early potential, and let me confess that in Edinburgh last week I bought another big stack of pelicans even though my summer reading project shelf is still looking full and I even have an untouched Sebald crying out for me.
Anyone want to borrow my job for a couple of days a week, free me up some time?

Friday 12 November 2010

One little word

How the world can change
It can change like that-
Due to one little word:"married".
See a palace rise
From a two room flat
Due to one little word:"Married".

And the old despair
That was often there
Suddenly ceases to be
For you wake one day,
Look around and say:
Somebody wonderful married me.

(normal unsentimental service will be resumed shortly)
(Kander and Ebb, if you're wondering)