Saturday 23 January 2010

Just because I can

Going home, despite its drawbacks, has its advantages: digital TV (reminds me that multichannel = lots more of nothing on), wood fires, a fat kitten (which apparently tries to get at the snooker balls on the television screen) and mother's new MacBook Pro. I'm very attached to my 7 year-old iBook, but it's starting to struggle. A MacBook keeps appearing in my dreams (largely, it must be said, enabling me to mark endless essays) and now I'll have to buy one… In the meantime, I'm just playing with this wonderful machine.


So, apart from marking, what have I been up to that I'd want to share with the world? Well, reading. I know, I know. It's a crazy zany mixed-up world. How about if I said I was reading TO THE EXTREME!!!!!? NU-reading? Reading to the MAX? Mm… perhaps not. 


What have I been reading? While marking, I read stuff that I'll never have to teach. Recently it's been Norman Spinrad's Child of Fortune, a really interesting exploration of the hippy ideal and where it went wrong - set in space (which is very 60s in itself). I've also read Burgess's End of the World News which is fun and interesting, and now I'm on Francis Wheen's Strange Days, his history of the paranoia and weirdness of the British political scene in the 1970s. Highly recommended. 

2 comments:

Zoot Horn said...

How can you read while marking - or let me put that more sensibly: how can you read during the marking period? My head won't let me. Since recently getting freeview tv it's all I can do to veg out in front of popular science documentaries, which I love, 'til the wee hours. They reveal the awesome grandeur of the evolutionary, geological and cosmic timescales, distances and processes which surround us and to which, if we wish to stay sane, we can compare the depth of our piles of marking. Books though? ferget it.

Kate said...

Ah, a kindred spirit, the delights of BBC4 and More4 are two of the things that keep me sane at the best of times! Re the reading whilst marking conundrum, as one nearing PhD completion (so in the head hurty in-depth analysis and write up phase) I empathise entirely, my solution to this is to read short stories. Books I'm currently reading I can recommend are Findings by Kathleen Jamie (non-fiction but still very interesting and engaging), Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link and No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July - google them and see if any take your fancy! :-)