Books I've been Reading

Having more time on my hands than usual over the last few months has given me more time to read. Like John at By Stargoose and Hanglands, I thought I'd share a few of the books I've been reading. 

1. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2.

One thing that's really kept me going these last few months has been Virginia Woolf's diaries. I find her an inspiring character. She wrote all sorts of things: diaries, letters, essays, novels... all as well as running the Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard Woolf. If she were alive today, she would probably be an avid blogger. Her diaries are remarkably varied: one minute she's spending the evening deep in intellectual conversation with, say, her friend TS Eliot, another, she's recording trivial details of day-to-day life. My favourite, by far, is from 18th August, 1921: 'I hear poor Leonard, driving the lawn-mower up and down.' I found this very amusing, although I'm not sure why. I suppose we often imagine famous people doing the things they're famous for, as if they had nothing else to do, when in fact the vast majority of their lives are spent performing the same humdrum tasks as everyone else. 

Reading the diaries of others, I think, is probably a good way to get through periods such as this when one's own life is restricted. Woolf's diary, in particular, probably resonates with me not only because I love her novels but because many of her diary entries are written at Monks House, a cottage with a garden in a village - a situation not unlike our own. When they think of Woolf, people often think about her mental health and suicide. Doing so leads people to misrepresent her. Yes, now and again she's ill, but the Woolf that leaps out from her diaries is a positive, cheerful character. 

2. Migration by WS Merwin

WS Merwin, one-time US Poet Laureate, is a poet with a very distinctive voice. When you've read a poem or two, you get to notice his quirky, slightly Surrealist sensibility whenever you encounter it. Migration is a big book and it's packed with poems. This, one of the shortest, is a good advert for the whole:

SEPARATION

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.

WS Merwin

3. The Complete Short Stories Volume 2 by JG Ballard

I'm currently dibbing in and reading these at random. A man finds a seashell on a beach which takes him on a journey through time. A man refuses to leave his house on the slopes of a volcano, despite the obvious terrifying signs of its imminent eruption. What became of Leonardo's Crucifixion, stolen from the Louvre in 1965? Leonardo never painted a Crucifixion: Ballard invented it and then told the story of its disappearance.

Some of these stories contain the seeds that went on to grow into novels. Some are shocking or experimental. Others are more straightforward - you never know quite what to expect when you start reading one! There are 56 stories and the whole runs to 775 pages.

4. This Other London by John Rogers

When you walk round with John Rogers, you realise what a many-layered city London is. Walker, writer and film-maker, he's a mine of information on everything from Iron Age settlements under the runways of Heathrow Airport to the course of the Northern Outfall Sewage Pipe. He'll tell you, to choose a random example, that a terraced house in Tulse Hill was built on the site of a Victorian observatory where the earliest experiments in spectroscope technology took place (spectroscopes detect the chemical composition of stars). Did you know that Van Gogh once lived in SW9? I didn't. Intriguing reading.

I should add that anyone who only knows Russell Brand from the tabloid coverage of his comedic excesses will be surprised to meet the sweet guy who wrote the Foreword.

I've embedded a short video below which John Rogers made to plug the book.