Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

One thing I'd like to know, and I've covered similar ground before when lamentiung how little I've read compared to how much one is supposed to have read (by the time of nearly one's 57th birthday), is when is one supposed to do all this reading.
I don't lead a particularly busy life by anybody's standards. It is now twenty years since I devoted much of the available 'leisure time' to clocking up miles on the bicycle in pursuit of personal bests in the 12 Hour discipline. But as I enter a terrifying week or two of 'some activity', I wonder when I'll get back to reading the accumulation of books I've recently bought, and been very kindly sent, never mind finding an hour to add another thousand words to the 11000 extant of the appalling novel, Time After Time.
Even of the most meticulously-planned weekend, there is the paper to read, the crosswords to look at, the horse racing to judiciously invest in (sorry about the first of the 2016 Saturday naps) and watch, the TLS to wonder at in all its self-regarding highbrow decadence. That's betting without ever writing a poem of my own, even giving a thought to household maintenance, going out to a concert or, heaven forbid, a social event.
Many of the great and good, including David Baddiel and Philip Larkin, served as judges on the Booker Prize panel. My only strategy in such a position would have to be to find an issue to resign over as soon as possible, before anybody else did. Books are welcome to replace life but not quite to that extent.
Those scholars that devote their lives to Hamlet or Ulysses. Do they ever read anything else, not even Lear or Dubliners. Not even Marlowe or Virginia Woolf.
I am grateful to my friend who has directed to me not only the classic 'O' level text of Ovid on Himself for my birthday but also Richard Cohen's How to Write like Tolstoy. At school, we used to compare rates of reading which meant pages per hour. Too much of my mis-spent youth, that could have been mis-spent playing pool, was mis-spent reading Solzhenitsyn and Cancer Ward, Lenin in Zurich or three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago could drag me down to 20 pages an hour but I was determined and stamina, it was to prove, was something I had.
Thus I understand Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, because his dual role of marathon runner and novelist is the much harder enterprise he undertook compared to when I was long-distance cyclist and poet.
But Cohen has apprently read everything. I'm not offended that my friend has sent me a book on how to write like Tolstoy as I set off once again in the vague hope of finishing a 50000 word novel that nobody will ever read, and it is not the manual that its title suggests. He writes towards the end of a professional career as editor to many big name novelists and thus didn't need to attend 9 to 5 at an office doing something entirely unrelated. Perhaps he never covered 217 miles on a bike in 12 hours, carve out a niche career as a poet of little renown or turn out for a local cricket team as mercurial, profligate batsman and increasingly accurate and frugal bowler, but then, somewhat overwhelmingly, his biographical note says he did sword fighting at four Olympic Games. So, I don't know.
Michael Schmidt's various histories of poetry that demonstrate, without necssarily meaning to, that he has read them all and has something to say about each of them.
I understand that Bertrand Russell said, when asked what he would say to God if it turned out that God existed, you didn't give me enough evidence.
If asked why I didn't read enough, I will have to say I didn't have enough time.

But those books remained no further read while I poured out this hopeless lament and lined up a double at Huntingdon tomorrow. Theligny (3.00) was hugely impressive when backed last time out and I've decided I'm not frightened of the Henderson horse in opposition. And I think we can oppose the favourite in the first with The Way You Dance (2.00)