Reading.

Here they are: my recent acquisitions.


And I still haven't read the recent acquisitions or the ones before that and the guilt is piling up in thick ugly layers, and I think that maybe what I need to do after I have gone to China is just go away somewhere and not do anything else but read and read and read and sometimes I think I am not going to live long enough to read all my books, in fact I think it is a good bet that I shan't live long enough to read all my books because I am sure they are going to come into this house faster than I can read them and yet I still love them, and rip the small brown jiffy bags open with the same Christmas zeal I've always had, and get that strange thrill of anticipation at seeing all that print, all those pictures, all those words and the promise of yet more worlds that no one else will know because a book is a fusion between the world written and the world read - an imperfect overlap producing something new again.


And tonight then, I read. Two short chap books I've bought from Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press: What Happens when you Wake Up in the Middle of the Night by Michael Marshall Smith and The Safe Children by Tom Fletcher - both such wonderfully strange stories and disturbing visions of adjacent worlds that could be but luckily aren't.