On my bedside table...

Micro-reviews of books I've been reading this month...

Dear Friends,

Hello and happy Saturday! Praise be, I am glad to report I have mostly recovered from covid, and am pleased it didn’t take that long to test negative. I still have a chesty cough (which seemed to come on after I recovered), but I am very thankful to have been back to normal this week, though writing is still going a bit slowly. Those of you who used to follow my Patreon will remember that I used to post an entry once a month called “On my bedside table” where I reviewed the books I’d been reading that month (for pleasure), and I thought I’d renew the practice.

Novels, novels, novels… there is a strange paradox in my life wherein when I write more, I also read more. You might think “this is not a paradox— these things are related” but to me it seems like a paradox because I both, hypothetically, have less time, and less brain power. I’d say it is a form of procrastination, but I don’t think it is because it usually corresponds with increased productivity. But perhaps I simply am more in the book mode generally when I’m writing intensively, a fact which has probably been exacerbated by the fact that the wifi isn’t very good in my flat so it’s hard to watch movies. All this to say, I have finished five novels in the last month and a half: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (re-read), Silas Marner by George Eliot (re-read), book 2 & 3 of The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, and Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. So, some brief notes on it all.