I updated it

I want to keep a list of books I’ve read this holidays, yes I am just showing off, so far is:
After the Flood
Oryx and Crake
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Island of the Day Before
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The Faithful Spy
The Lovely Bones
The Art of Fielding
Dirt Music
A Visit from the Goon Squad
All the Sad Young Literary Men
Defining the Beaufort Scale
The Executioner’s Song
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (soon…but it’s term so I’m kinda out of time)

On Novels

Have finished Art of Fielding, started on Dirt Music. Fiction is rather all-or-nothing. You can go through life living entirely in the present, never touched by it and be happy, but if you start reading you have to read and read until you have worked out life, all of it, through the stories and know how to live. I’m not sure if anyone ever gets there. I’m not sure that people of decent intelligence can live in the present either, thus suspension in limbo, the human condition, paradox of aesthetics etc.

Dirt Music is the sort of novel where strong emotions and events shape people’s lives inexorably. Of course this is true in real life as well, if blurred by the details of everyday. We think we’ve moved on but from far away our lives are clearly on a course directed – or bumped off course – by our divorce, alcoholism, disappointment, childhood neglect, and all that just from my own extended family.

It’s telling me to wait for these axes of life to reach me, not to reach out and try to extract strong emotion from shallow souls and failures and victories. Because it will mark you. always marks you and you’ve squandered that away over nothing.