Haven't posted for ages, sorry! Poor health in the family has meant I haven't been able to get out much. The amount of work I've had to do has meant I've had little time to read. I'm still trying to get through Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie and Gulag by Annie Applebaum. These need to be finished before the end of term so I can tackle my reading list for the holidays.
Unable to do anything other than watch tv the other night, but also unable to find anything worth watching, I came across a documentary on William Golding. Although I haven't read his book for years, I seemed to know many of the passages read out by heart. I can't think of a more significant postwar novelist. His ability to enter a strange world and explain it fully - the last of the Neanderthals, the building of a cathedral spire - the lean, exact poetry of his prose, the great moral themes. It was reading Golding that led me to university: I found the opening pages of Free Fall hard to understand at times. I read and re-read, analysing, interpreting, and eventually broke through. This deeper ability to analyse gave me the confidence to apply to university to study Music and English.
Unfortunately, the admissions chap suggested that he had too many English students and would I mind awfully studying Russian instead? Will this decide whether you offer me a place I asked. Yes, said he, and I became a Music/Russian/French student on the spot. I'd done a term of Russian at the Burslem Delinquents High School and loved it. So I loved studying French literary theory, reading authors like Flaubert and Dostoevsky in the original language, all thanks to wanting to get to grips with Golding.
So my Christmas reading list will be his first 5 novels, I haven't read Lord of the Flies since I was 10, over 40 years ago, can't wait.
