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I'm completely exhausted and must soon make myself some soup or something. Anyway, I thought - God knows why - I'd actually try to list my leisure reading for this year, to keep a track of my reading habits. I've never done it before. I'll keep this list in this particular blog entry, but I won't make it a sticky post, so if you're at all interested, you'll just have to bookmark it or something. I'll only list the books I actually finish (not those I merely dip into, which I tend to do quite a lot these days) and I won't list the books that I read in relation to my work for Chômu Press. This is strictly what I read away from the computer screen 'on my own time'. At the time of starting this blog post, I have a number of books 'on the go', including Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces by C.S. Lewis, Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren, Hadrian the Seventh by Baron Corvo aka Fr. Rolfe, which I've almost finished and which sadly I've pretty much hated, Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, Meido by Uchida Hyakken, which I'm reading very slowly, The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which has been in my reading limbo for months, and a number of other volumes that I'll probably remember at some point or another.

Anyway, I'll list, below, the books I've read, as I finish them, along with any summaries I feel like making:

January

The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, by Robert Baldick. A bigraphy of J.-K. Huysmans, and the best thing I've read in a very long time. Huysmans is someone whose work I am sure I will keep returning to throughout my life, and this book has given me invaluable insight into the author, as well as into a fascinating human life.

A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Some notebooks kept by Lewis after the death of his wife. I'm not a big fan of British literature, but Lewis, in his essays, exhibits what I think of as the particular virtues of good British writing. I suppose one word that comes to mind is 'concision' - using precisely the right word in the right place, without flab, in such a way that one's prose tends towards aphorism. Regarding the subject matter - generally with Lewis, there are some areas to which I cannot follow, sympathetically speaking, but I am fascinated to find whole passages that seem like my own thought processes dictated onto the page.

February

On the 3rd or 4th, I believe, I finished Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Although I still think everyone should read this, I'm sometimes not sure whether Bradbury is really a good writer. My impression of his writing is that he's a tightrope walker who gets to the other side by sheer speed. The results are not always convincingly elegant, but the fact is, he does get there, without falling. He seems quite regularly to create emotionally affecting scenes, too, which is an ability not to be underestimated. This work belongs to me with Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (I know the first two films, not the book) in having a possible anti-Nirvana message, which I appreciate. Books represent intellectual conflict (of which Nirvana is supposedly the end), just as emotions represent a similar conflict in Bodysnatchers (especially the 70s version). Not sure about some of the folksy wisdom contained in 451. Quite near the end of the book is a use of the word "Godamn" (very minor point, but) that represents to me some of the weaknesses of American fiction.