How I have read this year in comparison with last and many previous years.
And how the focus of my reading has also changed.
My latest read has been McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy - a travelogue and an autobiography and a meditation on personal history, public history and the sense of place and belonging.
It makes me think that I should suggest that Ross and I make a point of travelling round Ireland sometime.
And the book has had me laughing out loud on the bus ride to work. In London, this would have been the cue for folk to avoid you because you are unhinged. Here, they look over your shoulder to see what is so funny.
I've just started The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It travels under the weighty labels of being an international bestseller and a publishing phenomenon. Normally, I avoid such books as the blurbs do not do the content much justice. In this case, I was strangely drawn. And it was right that I should be.
The book exemplifies the extreme difficulty of writing with limpid simplicity and carries off the task with masterful achievement. It does with words what Bach did with sounds. The prose is stripped, stripped so bare that there hardly appears to be any artifice and yet the resonance of the language, the accumulated power of the narrative and its symbols resonate far beyond mere story telling.
It is a fantasy and a parable about listening to your heart and following your fate.
It occurs to me that no-one writes urban parables.
I've also been listening to the BBC classic serial tapes of The Barchester Chronicles by Anthony Trollope. These are much loved by me and, as time goes on, I find them even more moving than I first did when I listened to the sequence in 1997 and again in 1999. I feel less fixated by the racy trollop joke these days, however.
Listening this time, I am struck by the fact that none of the characters is really bad. People are misguided or act with selfish motives but no-one, as in Dickens, is really wicked. So the dynamic of the writing is not an adversarial conflict between good and evil but rather an exploration through space and time of what it means to lead a good life in an imperfect world.
Three very different sorts of writers and writing. I learnt from them all.