Inertia

There are books to list and things to do. Ink cartridges to replace. People to phone. I sit here doing nothing. I feel as if someone has poured lead into me. I wish I had a barometer; I'm sure this lethargy is something to do with atmospheric pressure. The temperature has risen to +10 and it's raining.

Desert Island Books

It's possible to read the whole of 'Siddhartha' on line. I wanted to find the line about asking the rhinocerus the meaning of life. Unfortunately Safari keeps quitting before I can complete the search. It's never Siddhartha that comes into the shop. I think people hang on to it whereas they are happy enough to release 'Narcissus and Goldmund' 'Demian' and so on. Next time it does turn up I shall keep it. I compile a list of Desert Island books from time to time and it doesn't change much. Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence' sequence, which I suppose counts as five books. Wu Ch'eng En: 'Monkey.' 'Siddhartha' as already mentioned. 'Score' by Jilly Cooper (must have some light relief.) After that it vacillates with my mood. Evelyn Waugh. Phil Rickman. Catch 22. Ulysses - well, I'd have plenty of time, but is it worth the effort. The complete works of Reginald Hill? Not the classics. Not Dickens thank you very much. Most emphatically not Hardy. I will need something to make me laugh written by people who enjoy the language. I would have Shakespeare of course but would swop the Bible for something else - Bhagavad Ghita or the Vedas maybe. Or the Torah. Lots of volumes of poetry. T.S Eliot (and his plays of course) Dylan Thomas. Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath. Roger McGough. Pablo Neruda.

Virginia Woolf probably wouldn't be included although she was important to me once. I re-read 'Orlando' recently because Nick and I watched the film together and I couldn't remember the book well enough to know how faithful they had been to it. Tilda Swanson who played Orlando is the wife of one of my best customers, Gentleman John. She was excellent in the role. In the end I decided the film carried the spirit of the book very well. There's a point, when Orlando has become a woman, that V goes into an indulgent chapter or three about literature and loses my attention. When I wrote my dissertation on her so many years ago I didn't realise that the book was a love letter to Vita Sackvile-West, or so V S-W's son claims. None of the learned crits I read at the time suggested that, unless I was too naive to pick it up. Nor did I know that it was published at the same time as a lesbian love story was banned in the US - mainly because VW had Orlando begin his/her existance as a man. Cunning old VW.