The days aren't too long. I'd been 'working from home' since the start of lockdown anyway and so the transition was gradual. I'm not short of things to do and even before the prospects of local lunchtime concerts kick up again, there are plenty of books that need catching up on either for the first time or re-reading. The progress I've made in recent months making my house look like a place that could be lived in by somebody organized, like Keir Starmer, rather than a manifestation of the inside of Boris's chaotic mind, has impressed me even if visitors still wouldn't call it 'tidy'.
Before adding to the pile of not-necessarily-necessary titles of available books, it is better to be filling some of the gaps that one missed on the way to a degree in Eng Lit 40 years ago.
With the moumental Proust put back on the shelf, I'm well into Bleak House. It was something like Week 4 of the Victorian Lit course that was allocated to Charles Dickens while one had four other courses to be looking at made one realize that BA (Hons) was a matter of doing enough rather than all of it which for me meant mainly poetry. But one can hardly be an Eng Lit graduate only having read Great Expectations at school, so now I'm filling in the bits that justify the 2:1 I fooled Lancaster into giving me.
Dickens is a better writer than I thought. I was always much more of a George Eliot admirer. But he is also a cartoonist. It's enjoyable, it's not hard work. I can see why people like him. You don't need me to tell you about Dickens.
One will never be short of something to do because literature is inexhaustible but I don't know where to go to fulfil John Peel's old maxim that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that which he had. Are there really writers as yet unknown to, or unread by, me that I'll want to put ahead of my list of favourites. One's taste might change so that the 16 year old Roger McGough admirer feels more at home with Elizabeth Bishop by the time they're 60 but there must come a time when one no longer believes in the 'next big thing'.
I've sought advice from one who knows and a guide to Ulysses, that by Harry Blamires, is on its way to accompany my intrepid return to that once I've put Dickens back upstairs. I can't believe it's better than Dubliners or the Portrait but I need to give it every chance. Being happy enough wiith what Joyce I know, it's hard to imagine I have the scope to ever lie back and reflect that, yes, Finnegans Wake was the best book I ever read.
