And so it begins....

Let's keep this one easy.


I wasn't given any books for Christmas, which is unusual. In fact, only one book was given in our family: I gave my mum a copy of this book: http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Titles/75444/the-fine-colour-of-rust-pa-oreilly-9780007456390


or, to put it at more visually pleasing way:

I wouldn't really call it a ''glorious, life-affirming novel'' but it is rather sweet and will make you laugh and make you a little bit sad as well. It's very well written, yet easy reading which isn't patronising - and that's a very hard balance to achieve.


[And, 'on balance', I still haven't finished On Balance, the Adam Phillips essays from last year. Apologies for the slight inaccuracy of last blog entry, then.]


Some things I'm looking forward to this year:
- finishing Siddharta Mukherjee's Emporer of all Maladies: a biography of cancer. It's a pretty dense book, full of fascinating facts, and that's exactly the sort of book you need for January when you haven't got any money and you're not drinking and you're a bit fed up of socialising.


On that somewhat grumpy note, I'm looking forward to ignoring the Olympics and reading some books about places far away. I caught a few minutes of Gulliver's Travels over the break, and I wouldn't mind reading that again. I very much enjoyed it last time, but felt I didn't give it the attention it deserved.


I suppose I'll need to read some Dickens stuff, to feel like I've ''got it''. Speaking of anniversaries, there's the Titanic too. A bunch of books are coming out for this, and most of them seem to be pretty weak. The really strong Titanic book out there right now is, I think, Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic, or, the Sinking of J Bruce Issmay. What a brilliant title, for starters. And the whole book is just excellent. Back in September time, a book called Titanic Style was released. It's all about fashion and clothing on the Titanic, and it sounds excellent (I'm basing this on a review of it which I read in the TLS, by Wilson, above). I did look into buying this - because it might be relevant to the PhD that I'll never do - but it seems to be a bit hard to get hold of right now. But that just makes it extra special.


It's also the anniversary of Prince Albert's death. Jules Stewart, a journalist, wrote a biography of him, which also came out late last year. I'm a big fan of Albert, so this is definitely on the list.


Lots of critics are suggesting that 2012 is the year of the short story, and I'm very much in agreement about this. Etgar Keret has a collection coming out soon, and it's a very good one. So if I were you, I'd get me to a bookshop, sharpish.


There we go. I'm not back at work until tomorrow and things are still a bit all over the place (NYE was very special and I'm still sort of reeling from it) hence the stilted thing. Oh, and for Christmas I did get a subscription to the LRB. So that's good.