I Like Your Mom's Books

I'm actually only writing this since it's been a week since my last update.

I was at my friend's house a few days ago. This particular friend happens to have a mother who studied English at university, and we all know what that means: BOOKS. For years now I have looked at the cornucopia of books and wanted so badly to take them home and read them. Unfortunately my friend always said I wasn't allowed to. This time, however, PATRICIA (his mother) came into the room while I was gazing longingly at the bookcase. We launched into an enormous, digressive conversation about this and that author while she enthusiastically thrust books into my hands to read this summer. I have to say I'm very excited. So, without further adieu, Matthew's Summer Reading List:

• 'My Antonia' my Willa Cather
• 'Mrs Dalloway' by Virginia Woolf
• 'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf'
• 'A Farewell to Arms' by Ernest Hemingway'
• A book of short stories by Chekov
• 'The English Patient' by Michael Ondaatje
• 'The Glass Menagerie', 'Sweet Bird of Youth', 'A Streetcar Named Desire' by Tennessee Williams
• 'A Raisin in the Sun' by Lorraine Hansbury
• The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake

That's the general rough order of when I'm going to read them, although it's highly dependent on how taxing each book is. I might add in some mind-numbing tweeny books along the way. For comfort, you see.

And, of course, there's Les Mis. The less said of my 'progress' the better.

I always forget to give posts a title

It's never a good idea to start writing a blog post when you have absolutely no idea what you're going to say. It inevitably leads to rambling. Oh well.

So, my one-year anniversary of reading Les Miserables is coming up in a little over a month. Yes, I have been reading it for over eleven months. On and off. While reading many other books. And generally having a life. There are two very clear reasons why this book is taking me so long to read:

• It's ENORMOUS. There are just so many pages to this book. It requires such immense willpower to just consider reading it.
• No writer that has ever lived will digress quite as prosaically as Victor Hugo. Les Mis is absolutely excellent when he's directing the plot, themes or character. However, every few hundred pages Hugo just launches into a rant about something not entirely irrelevant, but so insignificant that one could easily grasp the scene without a sixty-page rant about a convent. This just makes the former point even more difficult. Just keep to the actual point and we'll get along fine, Monsieur Hugo.

That's all that I'm going to say on Les Mis. It's SUMMER VAYCAY, as I've heard said in various American TV programmes. Unfortunately everybody is leaving me this summer. Enormous holidays in New Zealand and Japan do not make me happy. What are you supposed to do without people around you?

(You could write...)

HUSH. That is most definitely on the agenda for this summer. Just leave it to me. I'm doing nothing tomorrow. I'll brainstorm. I'll hunt for plot bunnies. I will ride the wave of creative...wonder.

I hate the way advertisements make you want things.