When books come, they come not single spies but in battalions, as Richard III says in Edward Marlowe's play that ends with him being murdered in excruciating fashion in Berkeley Castle.O, yes, you can trust me with the apposite literary quotation because I did Eng Lit at University, you see, and nobody left Lancaster in 1981 with a better English degree than me. But, quite honestly, I'm not sure that what I knew and could do then was really worth a degree, and perhaps not even what I could do now. Or perhaps a degree is not all it's cracked up to be.
But a few weeks ago I was struggling to find something to read, scratching around Amazon for something new and wondering what there was on the shelves here that I felt like re-reading. I ended up with Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum and was very glad of it because it was a revelation, a long overdue acquaintance that was genuinely laugh out loud, brilliantly conceived in its handling of time scales and hugely confident for a debut novel. After that, I progressed to her short story collection, Not the End of the World, which is also very good. A little bit 'magic realist' perhaps at times but still a marvellous read.
But Kate has been put to one side for the time being, and she can wait a week or so, because drought has suddenly turned into surfeit and I now have four books officially on the go.
I was very kindly lent a copy of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart following the Nigerian laureate's death and I began that, not being anywhere near impolite enough to turn it away in the circumstances. But then, somewhat ahead of schedule, the new volume on the subject of Shakespeare authorship arrived, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, co-edited by Stanley Wells, and since that is a specific area of interest, that has to become a priority.
And then Michael Symmons Roberts' new collection, Drysalter, turns up as well. And I can honestly say it's now hard to know which way to look as all four of these books are excellent, and so one does the obvious thing, absolving oneself of all responsibility, and drinks half a bottle of gin. But time is on my side with Atkinson and Achebe and so the Shakespeare and the poetry are the weekend reading because this website likes to get in quick with its reviews if and when it can.
The permanent discomfort of my reading is that I'm not happy if I have nothing specific to be involved with but, once I am reading something that I'm going to want to make mention of on here (and let us not glorify my efforts as 'reviews' too often), I want to finish it as soon as possible and bang my notice up on the interweb. It's a sad and strange affliction. In fact, doing this website, the benefit of which is only to keep me honest, is not particularly good for my reading health, if I were to ever care about that.
But, next up, if the drought recurs, I have a plan to fill in the bit of English poetry history that my B.A. (Hons) from 32 years ago didn't include in the sweep from Elizabethan to Seamus Heaney. I didn't do C18th Literature. I feel as if I've read sufficient Romantic Poetry in the years since 1981, and Keats seems to me like the poetry equivalent of Sibelius- someone that surely everyone must like, even if Keats does swoon a lot, but Pope and Dryden remain a bit of a mystery. For the very good reason that I've never fancied them much, it has to be said. But, between Milton and Wordsworth, I am aware of a gap that I really ought to bodge up with some attempt at understanding and so my next hiatus might be solved with a cursory look at C18th English Poetry. I can't say I'm looking forward to it but I've been surprised before and I have hopes of Pope even if I'm less confident of Dryden.