Break the back of christmas

Howdy,

Well I feel like I'm over the most of Christmas now. I did get to read some. Picked up Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas on Christmas eve for myself and finished it Christmas day . Its a good book. The tag line being something like great trajedy seen through Innocent eyes. I think this will definitely get made into a move. Its not that long and reads really quickly and has an interesting ending. So yeah I could really recommend it but it probably won't change your life. I find so like of art changes my life anymore. Maybe that's because there's now so much of my life that I its takes more to change it. I think we may just get nudged around by circumstances. Perhaps that's why older men need something catastrophic (heart bypass) to change their habits. Anyhow.

Other than that I'm still wading through The Trial by Kafka which is quite short but slow going, but have that aside for A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World is I guess a futuristic novel written in 1932 about a Utopian society. It is interesting to see how much of everyday life he has gotten right. E.g. one of the female character was disappointed by a hotel on a recent trip to the north pole as it didn't have a telly in every room. You could kinda of tell this was supposed to be tongue in cheek, i.e. that people of the time should baulk at the idea of it, but now it is the case. Also I never knew where the word soma, which is one of the tracks on smashing pumpkins Siamese dream album, came from, now I get it. Soma is the drug they take in the future to ease peoples minds, seems pretty cool drug, you can take 1 gram to cal your nerves and give you a good feeling, take 4 or more and you're off into some cosmic hallucinogenic dream - far out man.

Back into it via Polysyballic spree

Well,

I just made a balls of my previous draft of this post and now I've to write it again so I'll forgo the excellent prose that filled the first version.

Basically I ain't posted in a while because I've been reading dickens Oliver. This is of course part of my trawl through literature. Only problem is once you get past the "please sir can I have some more" its all down hill and that's almost in the second chapter. And theres now "food, glorious fooood" song in the book obviously. Anyhow thats not to say that dickens didn't know what hes at. This was I think his second novel published as a serialised version in a paper. And it does actually read like that. You can just picture some toff getting the horse and carriage to work in the morning droolling over the dry wit of mr dickens. Essentially I've been doing the same on the luas. However this has meant that I have not been cycling and as a result perhaps not running and as a result, in addition to a lot of chrimbo excess have put on 2bls!!!!

Oliver was getting a little laborious and the thoughts of setting in Jane Eyre which is next on my shelf was not very appetising. Well cometh the time.... comeths the book. I was in waterstones trying to buy something for Michael when I noticed a book by Nick Hornby called Polysyllabic Spree. Its basically a compilation of articles he did for a literary magazine where he lists the books he bough and read (never the same) each month and give a rambling review of each. I was just what I needed because the whole point of the book is that certain books suit us at certain times and that we should be spontaneous in our reading and our purchasing of books.

I bought the book on Saturday, started reading it briefly before Tom and Talys and then got up early on Sunday morning and started into it. I had it finished by 10pm. Thats including a horrendous shopping trip to the blanch. (7000 car parking spaces, all full). So I've decided to put Oliver aside for a short while, I've only about 150 pages left and start something else on my list - Best of Sherlock Holmes. It was such a treat to start fresh into the book. Who knew Holmes did cocaine!, very topical.

Any how here's hoping the reading will go much more pleasantly now.