Saturday, November 24, 2012

Not waving but...


I don't want to boast - or, yes, I do - I worked out how to do this all by myself. Well... to be strictly accurate, I tried a slight variation on what Mr Life suggested that I do last night, but hey, that didn't work and this DID. [Bows.]

But you will admit: you wouldn't have thought that a sausage would flash before the eyes of a drowning man. (What would, I wonder?)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you need to read the previous post. Though only if you want to.

What are you reading these days? I'm re-reading Michael Frayn's wonderful autobiography - more a biography of his father - "My Father's Fortune" - really well-written and extremely interesting to compare with his equally terrific novel "Spies". I love seeing the inner workings of books; and some of the background of "Spies" clearly comes from his own boyhood. I'm also reading Jessica Mitford's collected letters, "Decca". I read lots of diaries and collections of letters and have read various collections of the Mitfords' correspondence. They were an extraordinary lot; and they wrote very entertainingly (including Debo the Duchess of Devonshire, who's still alive). But I'm not sure I'd want to be one of them. It would be a bit emotionally exhausting.

I don't usually have two books on the go but one belongs to a friend so I can't read it in the bath.

Now I really must get back to sorting out Stuff. I have a huge pile of it to my left. Groan.

6 comments:

  1. I am re-reading Watership Down. Not sure why, other than that I recommended it to my animal-mad son, downloaded it for the Kindle, started browsing and suddenly find myself a hundred pages in. Must be 30 years or more since I last read it.

    And I am pretty sure my drowning thought would not be a sausage. Chocolate, yes. Sausage, no.

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  2. i think i may have uncovered a clue to solving the mystery of the drowning man thinking about sausage ... Utopenci is a Czech sausage - the name "drowned persons" refers to pale-colored "fingers" of sausage floating in liquid (shudder) ... there - that ought to ease your vegetarian mind.

    i am reading "Brave" (a Young Readers version of the movie) because the last book i read (John Adams) bruised my brain.

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  3. I read "Decca" recently and so enjoyed it ... but also slightly jealous at how people can be so central to politics - to have an opportunity for influence - by an accident of birth. It seems wrong.

    I'm reading Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa" and I'm very glad I didn't read it before we went there or we might not have gone!

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  4. I salute you for putting your shoulder to the NaBloBlahBlah and slogging on Isabelle. Call me a quitter....
    Speaking of brain bruising [Dianne, above] I cast aside a Maeve Binchy book because it was Boring. I haven't liked her writing for years so what did I expect? Now I'm reading "Seeking Peace" by Mary Pipher [made famous by her book "Reviving Ophelia.} I love a book that makes me want to sneak away from what I'm doing and read "just a few more pages" before I go back to being responsible. It was a slow start but now I can't put it down.

    I also want to reread "Watership Down!"

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  5. I've just finished The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. Glenn Patterson. Quite fascinating story of the time when Belfast started to build itself right up post Enlightenment and United Irishmen. Gets a bit lost for pace in the middle but possibly the best opening and closing of any novel I've read. About to do my annual reading of A Christmas Mystery- a book about a magical advent calendar written in twenty-four chapters so that the book is an advent calendar. Jostein Gaardner. I rave about it every year in the blogosphere!

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  6. I might read that book. It got me curious. I haven't read your previous post but it bugs me why a drowning man would think about a sausage? It's driving me nuts.
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