Reading List

It's taken me a couple of years to get back in the habit of reading. Ever since I stopped the daily commute to work, I've found it difficult to set aside time for the luxury of fiction. Oh, there have been the odd exceptions: a Gaiman, Pratchett or Pullman. But no sustained book-after-book reading. No 700-page+ bury yourself and come up for air works.

Hour-long train journeys (well, 75-minutes plus delays, cancellations, engineering works and bomb alerts) meant I always carried at least one if not two books with me.

Since then, very little. I start a book, leave it for a while, fail to get back into it and give up.

I can't say it was a New Year Resolution (another subject for another post), but this year I have made a special, sustained effort and it seems to be working.

This is the list of books I have read. Apart from first and last, they are in no particular order - except I think the quality of the first helped as a springboard to the second, and so on it went. And I'm not boasting - no-one reads this rubbish, so who would listen to my boasts? This is just a list of very good books I happen to have read.

So, this year I have been mostly reading:

• Halting State by Charles Stross
• Odd And The Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith
• Sir Gawain And The Green Knight Trans. by Simon Armitage
• The Night Watch by Sarah Walters
• The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak
• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Notes From An Exhibition by Patrick Gale
• Once Upon A Time In The North by Philip Pullman
• Hogarth by Jenny Uglow

There were two failures:

• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
• The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Perhaps I was being a little ambitious, but I will read both again.

And so - as night follows day and politicians follow sporting success - now that I'm reading regularly, the urge to write catches flame within me, and my demons come to snuff that flame out again.

To arms!

It's That Time of Year Again

It's summer.

The sunlight is filtered through blossom-clad trees, falling upon a young woman walking an otherwise deserted street on her way to meet her boyfriend. She wears a floaty, flowery dress and a smile of anticipation.

Suddenly, a gust of wind carries 'stuff' into the air. She stops, her face screws itself up in anguish as she--

*tch*

Oh No! She suffers with Hay Fever! Her day is about to be ruined - call the army!

Who - purely by chance, naturally - happen to be hiding behind hedges and low walls as they have been watching and following her just in case this situation should arise. They leap to her defense...


Except it isn't really like that, is it? That 'stuff' wasn't pollen ,as pollen is invisible. It was most probably seeds and butterfly wings. Stuff. And if I just went *tch* I wouldn't have to carry several hankies. My experience of seasonal allergic rhinitis is somewhat different:

• Swollen, red itchy-to-the-point-of-painful watery eyes
• Sneezing so much I turn into a sodden mess of hankies, tissues, shirt
• The inability to get fresh air into my lungs because of asthma - usually late in the evening
• The all-pervading, bone-aching weariness that won't go away

I'm on 2 kinds of medication and an inhaler. Lime trees are my enemy. Why couldn't it have been Dutch Lime disease back in the seventies?

June and July, you can set your calendar by me. June and July. Juno and Julius Caesar. I count the sneezes til the month of Augustus. Joon and Julie, Julian Joon. When I am a published author - one day - I'll write a novel: The Unpleasant Profession of Julian Joon. I shall make his life miserable - Job will feel himself blessed. My revenge will be long, sweet and lime-scented.