champagne dog run sling factory tour bonnie umbrella

champagne dog run sling factory tour bonnie umbrella
honestly right now i feel ok about myself,
grateful for what ive been given and have achieved in my four decades so far
maybe i’m ready to start reading novels again
found the partick co-op for a just poetic society
if things are going to change anyway, they may as well change for the better

i have been reading novels again. i spent a long time in the non-fiction wilderness. since 2022 i had a series of medical events. i lost weight, got misdiagnosed, brushed up against mortality. went through some big life events. the events in my life were disorientating and confusing. i didn’t have the mental bandwidth to care about the characters in novels.

so i spent a couple of years going down rabbit holes: nutrition, health, psychotherapy, ptsd, autism, music theory.

thankfully, i seem to be about back to normal. i’m just about to start sally rooney’s latest, and i just finished klara and the sun by kazuo ishiguro.

no and today is so much better than yesterday / infinitely, nice things are nicer than nasty ones

this is a reference to lucky jim by kingsley amis. i had referenced his son a week or so prior. two witty 20th century men. they are dying out, the 20th century men of letters. clive james. christopher hitchens. milan kundera are a few i remember grieving. a lot of them died long before i was born though. george orwell. graham greene.

i think the 20th century novel will forever be tempting to me. modern enough that i understand the social relationships. but historic enough that plots don’t have to be squeezed painfully around mobile phones, gps and dna evidence. a simpler time. more scope for (getting away with) mischief.

and the 21st century novel? we will talk of the 21st century women, not men. we will talk of rooney, smith and mantel, not even bothering with first names, because these are important women of letters.

what are you reading?

the wind cools and we race to the ferry and over the hill / comfortable in the air between fiction and essay—

the best bike rides have boats in them. that’s just a fact. we were nearing the end of the holiday, and fortunately the wind calmed a bit and we got an epic ride over the big mountain in.

i was comfortable and cool in the breeze, and considering one of my favourite writers – milan kundera. he writes perfect prose, light yet weighty. deep with philosophy, shallow with the needs of flesh. the story is unimportant – the storyteller is the whole show. characters, plots and places are tools which the author uses to carve the meaning of life into his reader.