What to Read Next

 With the new Julian Barnes not due for another week, the minor Vermeer festival over and the desperate need to have a book on the go and nothing on order from the library, I had to resort to the reserve of my own library to maintain the strategic position. Having at least one book to read is not only a default setting but a defence against such realism as decorating, dusting or any deeper spring clean.

The pile of About Larkin back issues have been great but that's 'occasional' reading. And maybe all poetry is that. I'm ever more unwilling to accept its own advertisement for itself as a higher calling, aspiring to the condition of music and in any way 'better'. Thus, the option of selecting a handful of poetry books to revisit was soon discounted. The chronically deferred intention to have a proper look at the C18th has been given the least diligent attention by moving the Complete Alexander Pope from its shelf, wiping the dust off it, opening it and leaving it in the front room. I'm sure it's good at what it does, I'm sure it's clever but it's verse, not poetry, and satire has a point to make and the best poetry, as per the quote about Vermeer below, has to be better than that. Politics, morality and points of view don't lend themselves to poetry which does what it does best when it's allusive, illusory, perhaps even evasive but mainly unwilling to be defined. The Dunciad takes up 100 pages. I'd like to be able to say I've read it so that I can decide for myself if it's any good, or if not why not, but my mind would wander and those few hours could be spent watching old films, horse races I'll have forgotten by next week or trying to think of a book to write rather than which one to read. One looks at the first page of Finnegans Wake yet again, knowing that the weight of annontations required to 'get it' outweigh the pont of reading it.

An internet item pops up about comic novels and lists The Confederacy of Dunces which I know is upstairs. It came highly recommended and delivered to me with others but I didn't get on with it. I look again and reflect that all such Garp, Jonathan Coe, probably Wodehouse and certainly Douglas Adams don't make me laugh whereas I can watch Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Blackadder and much of The Office time and again.

But, there was Cold Comfort Farm, one of those 'others' that was begifted years ago, that might be given a chance. It is filling the gap most ably. I didn't see the TV adaptation but have some idea that it could be bracketed with The League of Gentlemen and Royston Vasey but, having googled that combination and found nothing, can only think I've either stumbled on a similarity or I'm very much mistaken.

Still, it's a weirdly entrancing and, so far, superbly sustained performance and it's hard to know how much more unread material there is upstairs. The furniture, the clothes, everything else, would be first to go ahead of the books and records in any emergency.