I keep wondering if I will go off reading and, I dunno, start playing the Xbox all day or something. But it certainly didn't happen in '09.

This was actually one of my favourite years for good books. I finally got through some novels in French, including Victor Hugo, who was so much fun. I finally read some good African literature thanks to Ngũgĩ wa ( Read more... )

Random memories of the honeymoon, in no order:

*Stopping at a tiny railroad town in southern Tennessee and going to a proper old soda fountain, where the waitress thought we were French because we said we lived in Paris

*The Grand Ole Opry on our last night in Nashville - sheer genius. Although I remember the adverts best

*The lush cottage in the ( Read more... )

DM Thomas, Ararat
Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
Guy de Maupassant, Contes Divers (1875-1880)
DM Thomas, Birthstone
Iain M Banks, Look to Windward
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder
China Miéville, The City and the City
Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space
Lawrence Durrell, Justine
Lawrence Durell, Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive
Lawrence ( Read more... )

The last few days and even weeks have blurred together a little bit. I have a distinct feeling that I'll look back on the months before the wedding and remember NOTHING. A couple of weeks ago a few of our friends came out to Paris for a joint stag/hen do (shag do? sten do?), which was really awesome: we filled our new flat with sushi and red wine ( Read more... )

Over at Language Log - and I warn you, I can feel my anger levels rising already as I start to write about this - there is a link to a so-called "Grammar Test" devised by David Foster Wallace when he was running college workshops. It fills me with fury more than I can really express. It's a list of ten sentences, each containing one crucial ( Read more... )

(Hurrah, we finally have internet in our new flat!)

I've just read Nabokov's Transparent Things, a novel, or novella really, from the 70s, a first edition of which I found in a weird secondhand-bookshop-cum-tearoom round the corner from me run by an old woman from Omaha.

I was sent on a massive word-hunt by this sentence near the end:

On the ( Read more... )

I have been ill and off work today, mooching around the flat on our last day in it, and feeling bored. I really hope I'm feeling better tomorrow, because moving house in my current state is going to be a horrendous task.

I'm reading Davy Crockett's autobiography at the moment; it's a strange book, full of self-aggrandising and political ( Read more... )

One of the really fascinating things about many African countries is that they are wrestling with issues from Western Europe's past, in the modern world. For example, ‘tribalism’ of the kind that Western Europe hasn't known for 1000 years is a massive issue in sub-Saharan Africa. Botswana is lucky - as in so many things - in the fact that ( Read more... )

Today I visited a village of orphans just outside the city. The charity than runs it has operations all over the world -- there was one not far from me when I lived in Morocco -- but in Botswana it's a massive project because of the huge number of AIDS orphans ( Read more... )

Today, apparently in karmic payback for the flippant words in my last post, I ended up interviewing Alexander McCall Smith, who, it transpires, is in Botswana for a few days to coincide with the opening of his new opera, a version of Macbeth set among a troop of baboons.

As an opening sentence, I think you'll agree that has a lot to keep you going ( Read more... )