SLOW READER

Time has passed and the summer is here. I was working full-time for a while, as an exam invigilator, so I couldn’t do much writing. Then I got ill. Some kind of throat infection. The only good thing about being laid up in bed for a few days was that I read quite a lot. Waking up in the night, unable to get back to sleep, reading a few paragraphs of a book, falling asleep, dreaming that I’m reading the next bit - that sort of thing. No children’s fiction, but I read a lot of enjoyable novels. Amongst others, I read The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. A varied crop, but all good stuff, in my opinion. I’d like to read more, but I’m quite a slow reader. At the moment I’m chipping away at Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Some people, whose opinions I value, are in fact rather against Dickens. And I remember when I was a boy at school we would often be given comprehension exercises, which I hated, and the passage we were required to answer a list of inane questions on was invariably from Dickens, or perhaps Walter Scott. I therefore grew up viewing these writers with a certain amount of resentment. However, I have since revised my opinion, as far as Dickens is concerned at least. I suppose he has his flaws, but for me the teeming urban patchwork of his novels is hard to resist. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner? There are still a lot of his novels that I haven’t read. They can’t be rushed, however. At least, not by me. Like I say, I’m a slow reader...