15 June - Books & Musings

Am reading a book I like very much. This blog never really does reviews but it should reveal something of its writer’s tastes occasionally. So in the last few months, we’ve liked very much Netherland by Joseph O’Connor , we didn’t like Sense and Sensibility because we’ve encountered versions of its plot so many times, and neither was it that original when Ms Austen used it. We didn’t lucky the Japanese thriller because the writing was just not good enough and the characters not memorable, we’re going to like White Tiger when we mange to go past page 60, we liked the latest Lionel Shriver though super crap title, The Post Birthday World (what??) and we like enormously the Elegance of the Hedgehog (a French bestseller) because it’s just too funny and full of little allusions to all sort of arts and it’s fun to spot them or .. wonder ‘must come back to this one, don’t know what she’s talking about' moments.
And because she’s obsessed by language we love her even more. Must remember never to say can you please bring this to the drycleaner when the correct verb is take to , but then again I don’t think I naturally say bring this to the drycleaner. No, conscience clear. I say ‘take to’.

And because if I had ever found a plot way to link my thoughts that were going into my unwritten novel ‘The Architecture of Modern Living’, (don’t even think about nicking my title, I have notes from 2000 on this and can prove it’s mine mine mine) I’d have ended up covering similar ground to the Hedgehog. Yes indeed, my kind of musings.

There is no time to distil what I jot down on this blog. Most of the time it’s barely edited thoughts. I realise by reading the Hedgehog book that if one had the time, all those thoughts you come up with, could be really worth expanding on. If you expanded for days on end you’d become a philosopher. So the reason why most of us are not philosophers is not because we don’t have the mental capacity for this but because we don’t spend the time mulling it over. There you go, have absolved myself from being trivial and superficial. I just don’t have the time to become profound. I don’t have the necessary room of my own and annuity as well spotted by Ms Virginia Wolf. Glad the Hedgehog writer is a woman. Usually it’s men who have become philosophers as the only ones afforded the time sat on the stele and pondering whilst stroking beard. Think about it. from up there greek guy could easily piss and carry on. Women can't do that. What about Buddha? Would people have brought food and drink to a woman reclining under a tree rather than attempt to rape her whilst she sleep/ponders unprotected? You know, I sleep with men, doesn't mean I can for a second absolve the advantages they've had over women for thousands of years!