Reading

I realise that I have nothing to blog about because stuff is just happening without much need of comment or analysis from me.  Knockonwoodetc.

I read my way through the Booker shortlist for the first time. Back in the day when I was a bookseller (and when the husband who was a bookseller but is no longer a bookseller was still a bookseller), I just used to read a lot of new releases and generally I would have read most of the shortlisted books that looked vaguely interesting to me anyway.  And in recent years I have not paid much attention because I am always tired because I am a Career Lady now. So this year I read them all and I liked them all pretty much and I reckon the winner was probably the best book to win the prize and all, but I really enjoyed Jamrach's Menagerie and The Sisters Brothers most of all. Which may tell us one or two things, which includes that I have form for liking stories with 'menagerie' in the title, and also I seem to like chatty first-person books set in the 19th century with quite a lot of violence, provided it's violence that is excused one way or another by the narrator. Because I really adjectivally much like A True History of the Kelly Gang as well.

No doubt it exposes a terrible character flaw.  I never think of myself as a person who enjoys violence in any form, but there it is, there it is.

The Junior has been re-reading Garth Nix books and the Ranger's Apprentice series.  He doesn't seem to feel the need for any new books by authors he hasn't read before at the moment.  I am not quite sure what to think about this. On the one hand I think it's pretty bad to exclusively comfort read, but on the other hand I think he's already read more books than some people read in their entire lifetimes, so perhaps he deserves time to digest it all a bit.

The husband is doing marking, which is a completely different kind of reading and may result in violence, but less in a textual way and more in a storming about exasperatedly kind of way.

In worse news, when I was reading some words at work I read a word I wish I'd never read which was 'reablement'.  I thought they meant rehabilitation, but when you google it, it turns out to be a real word, or at least a frequently used one.  I guess I need to reable my brain to think a bit more flexibly or some such, but I found it very ugly indeed, although representing a most desirable principle, of course. It's no worse than rehabilitation really I suppose, but it's not what I'm used to, you see.