Clickety Click

 Click, click, clickety click goes the spend, spend, spend button. It could be worse because books are the best value entertainment there is. All one has to do is read fast enough to keep up with the rate of buying them but one thing you won't be reading here for a while is that intermittent leitmotif that says I'm wondering what to read next. It comes at a time when I've not only booked a holiday ( !!! ) but also bought a new fridge I might not have needed just yet. The power point, it would now appear, is what needs replacing, not the old fridge but in the spirit of Harry Worth and Terry and June one can see the funny side of such a misunderstanding.

The Thom Gunn biography due in summer was already on order but now one finds his old mate, Kleinzahler, has poems due in the autumn. Advance orders for those are laid down like bottles of Pauillac. It isn't strictly necessary to order the re-issues of the Rosemary Tonks novels I broke my own record to achieve in old editions but I certainly am prompted to return to Samuel Beckett after half a lifetime or more for his Dream of Fair to Middling Women in search of Lucia Joyce.

It might have been that half-lifetime ago that I read Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce if I ever did. I don't know. I have others but now, needing to expand the Joyce section of the library, I need to own a copy or else I won't feel Joycean enough.

All these things tie up, however loosely. Rosemary's mad devotion to her religion doesn't compare with Lucia's dignosed 'madness'. Joyce was vehemently not religious, which seems eminently common sense to me and then in today's Times there's a review of Heresy by Catherine Nixey due shortly extending what A.N. Wilson's book on Jesus had in it about what really happened and what a colossal misadventure Christianity was.

The problem will be in which order to read them. It's a good thing a couple of them aren't due here yet.