Thursday 11 October 2012

the correctness of claire

there are times when a heavy sequence of night shift is like being punched in the face. and moreso if you've actually been punched in the face. however...

there are things that brighten your day. i was heartened to come across this post at one night stanzas just before today's plunge into richard yates. lucky, lucky, lucky i say about the first half of the post, beautiful things fall into your hands? always a chance to use the word serendipity!

and then the icing on the cake. when we were in sweden last month we had a wee tour round t's brother's new abode. we're kind of used to the whole stockholm thing so this place was not only large but oozing character. from the carved wood of the doors to the stained glass and the big tiled fireplace all i could think that i was going to have to be installing myself on the balcony next summer and reading me some tolstoy.

on our return we had to be doing a second hand book buy which was a grand excuse for an edinburgh visit and a trawl round the fine second hand book stores in the grassmarket and the surrounds, and thence to the folio society.

there's a bit of a feel of dirty business about this book porn malarkey but if that's your thing then the folio society supplies it in spades. while tolstoy was furthest from my mind as we had our time grubbing about in the books as soon as i came across the folio version of anna karenina i knew that the only sound i will hear as i indulge in the hard backed goodness that is going to me sitting in a swedish summer drinking tea while reading anna karenina is the useless draining of my kindle's battery.

now it may be that the master and margarita doesn't tweak my literary twinky but who could resist the folio society version? it looks great! so i am totally in accord with claire in her advance christmas advice. and not just for that slack jawed book junkie in your life. take a bit of time. switch off that computer, hide the kindle/ipad or whatever device of satan circumstance has forced you into reading. go the full monkey and settle yourself down in a chair with one of these bad boys and give yourself up to that particular experience that used to be called reading. all else pales....

5 comments:

Roxana said...

your humour and reading advice are two things which have become such a taken-for-granted-part of my life that i can't even imagine your stopping to write here completely (i hope, i hope it never happens!).

i already worry about the little one: and if she doesn't like reading... how am i supposed to "instill" that taste into her? it is so hard for kids nowadays, faced with all this tv and film and computer games etc etc - how can their mind be atuned to the slow pace and patience that reading needs? i don't know. even my students tell me that reading is boring, it takes a lot of effort to go through the pages compared to wathcing a film (this is a quote from one of them, actually).

swiss said...

i suppose the simple answer would be to have no tv and no computer games but after the decades it's taken me to break the tv habit that's easier said than done! i never much got the computer game thing - i find them crushingly dull. but maybe that's all the games i used to play when i was a kid!

i find it almost distressing that you say your students find reading boring. why are they even studying!? tho i find similar attitudes in some of my young medical/nursing staff - they just can't be bothered.

equally tho, claire's wit mym daughter so not all hope is lost. another thing i find encouraging is the number of older people who are returning to reading vis their kindles. sure i don't like them nor, i suspect, much of what they're reading but at least they're reading.

i don't know what it's like where you are but i think one of the great losses of recent times is the lack of reading out loud whether it's children or adults. i still indulge this habit as often as possible but i find i'm in a company of one!

Claire said...

Thanks very much for this wee mention, only just spotted it :D

Marion McCready said...

both myself and Jamie are obsessed with books, can't help ourselves, came back from Israel with a handful of them each! our kids love books too though sorley especially is big into his Wii games. I don't mind as long as long as it's in proportion to the other things in his life, he really loves the outdoors and can name more trees than me!

swiss said...

no worries claire. folio books will always be a weakness for me!

i would hope you came back with a bunch of books marion - at the very least it makes me feel better about my house which is filled with just such 'crimes'. perhaps it helps with the insulation...