Book World

Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure

Samuel Johnson, from the The Life of Pope, on why it took Pope five years to translate Homer: 

"When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performance and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow – but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties."

Yes, I know all about indolence, interruption, business and pleasure.

 

2011: The Year of Reading Ruthlessly

Usually I am loathe to to give up on a book but the list of 50 novels to get through this year is making me more ruthless than usual.  The first casualty of the year is The Very Thought of You which has already committed three offences against my readerly sensibility and so gets crossed, rather than ticked, off the list. 

The charge sheet:

1.    Abuse of punctuation and lack of prose euphony:

 "There was one tender night in Berlin which Thomas would not forget.  A ball at the French embassy, when he held Elizabeth's waist and led her deftly round the dance floor, as if nobody else was there.  When their marriage was only weeks old."

 2.    Head hopping:  

On a single page in Ch 11 we dip in and out of three different points of view, which gives me the literary equivalent of sea-sickness.

3.    Lack of action despite interesting material:

How is it possible to make the evacuation of a young child feel flat and boring?  Having made it to p. 77 I am still waiting for the backstory to finish clunking past.  

Next: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker.  This should prove an interesting counterpoint; what little I know of it leads me to think that it is about making the mundane interesting.  As opposed to inadvertently making the interesting mundane.

Under the dust

Ooh look! I think I can see something under all this dust.  Yes! It's my blog!

I have made a sort-of, can't-quite-decide, but will try-it-anyway New Year's Resolution to pop in occasionally.  I do miss writing about books.  I haven't stopped reading; I have just become lazy.

And in another dose of New Year discipline my reading resolution for the year is to read 50 of the [unmentionably large number] of books patiently queuing up on my shelves.  I have even, efficiently, made a list of them and, being that sort of a person, am going through it in order.  As the books are arranged alphabetically on the shelf so the year's reading will progress alphabetically.  So far two Ackroyds have been ticked and now I'm onto Alison, Rosie - The Very Thought of You.

One of the unintentional and fun side effects of all this lovely alphabetical self discipline is setting off on a random voyage of discovery; there are many books on the shelves whose presence is something of a mystery to me, including The Very Thought of You.  No doubt some time last year I read a review, saw a blog post, heard a radio interview, tripped over a tweet in which this book was mentioned and was sufficiently interested or excited about the book/its content/author to buy it. But for the life of me I cannot now recall what the interest or excitement was, so I happily set off with no expectations or preconceptions.  A little like re-starting this blog really.