Appellations

I should confess my culpability; in adversity will I prove to be the good person I have always imagined or hoped? I finished Any Human Heart on Friday. I don’t think “profound” so apt, but certainly moving; sad stories are the best, those I remember anyway. Is “sad” a deserved label? I remember that same empty feeling having read Doctor Doolittle as a child, sad because it was the natural end of things, but there’s more to William Boyd's novel than that.

John refuses to patronize pubs with royal or aristocratic appellations as a matter of principle.

I’ve noticed a week or so will elapse before I pick up my next book, and again I’ve no idea what I’m going to read. Logan rates Gogol (a recommendation from a fictional character!) or there are traditional classics from such as Dickens or Hardy - I like a bit of tortured soul. They jostle for position and I’m increasingly aware of how little I’ve read, but I tell myself there’s plenty to keep me busy. Then there are those I have; numerous writers telling me how little I know. As a teenager I was all maths, science gave a kind of certainty to the world, yet now I often feel the opposite; it describes everything, telling me nothing. Muriel Rukeyser wrote “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms” - bloody poets.