True Love and High Adventure

True Love and High Adventure

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True Love and High Adventure

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"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Haha, the Today Programme just reported that President Kibaki of Kenya is suffering from depression and is staying in bed and reading PG Wodehouse. Good plan.

11:40
. . .

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

I've been ill for the best part of a week now, capable only of dragging myself between bed and sofa and eating ice cream. Thank god for books.

Book 13: Official and Confidential: the secret life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers
I don’t read very many biographies, because I always suspect that a) most biographers are hacks and b) most subjects of biographies turn out to be not that interesting. But I read this one because I’d been watching the Kennedy mini-series on DVD and Hoover (played by Vincent Gardenia) was the most interesting character in it. So I got a book (dauntingly huge) about him and lo and behold he was indeed completely insane. Possibly the most disturbing thing I learned was that he began his career at the Library of Congress, where he developed the mighty filing skills that would become the basis of his reign of terror at the FBI. I hereby promise that I will use my knowledge of classification systems for good, not evil…

Book 14: Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
A Christmas present that I’ve only just got round to reading. It retells the Jekyll and Hyde story from the perspective of Jekyll’s housemaid, and very absorbing and clever it is too. Not having read Stevenson’s original, I don’t know how closely this version conforms to it or which parts are totally imagined, but perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Book 15: The Bitch in the House edited by Cathi Hanauer
A collection of essays by American women at different stages in their lives. They all look at the struggles and surprises, both nice and nasty, involved in balancing career, sex, love, home and family. What’s interesting to me as someone still at an early stage of building an adult life is how much I get the urge to think ‘ah, I won’t be like that, I’ll have it all sorted, MY kids will be perfect, I WILL be able to have it all without DOING it all’. And then realising that all these women thought exactly that too. And not only that, but they mostly have high incomes, and the nannies and babysitters and cleaners that come with them. (And you don’t have to be a Marxist to note that essays written by those cleaners would have told stories of far harder struggle and much greater frustration.)

Book 16: Quick Service by PG Wodehouse
I don’t need to say anything about Wodehouse really. Just that there’s nothing better to read while you’re ill, even a relatively pedestrian effort like this one.

11:52
. . .

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