well in the case of your teacher it's kind of his job to know what he's talking about, but some people do seem to have a genuine ability to remember things like that. It's strange because I seem to retain the most banal inane facts whilst forgetting huge chunks of books I consider to be amongst my favourites.

I'm absolutely terrible at remembering quotations, which is particularly unhelpful when it comes to exam time. You're not alone! There's some stuff I can read about 5 or 6 times and still not remember a line of it, and it's annoying. Grr.

Once I've finished analysing the crap out of the last few books I've read, I'll probably have to move on to Genesis. Hurray. Somehow I'm supposed to get hold of a copy of the King James Bible, but I think I'll either stick to the internet or just not bother with that one. After that it's the Odyssey.

Really engrossing stuff. If you've ever tried to sift through the sleevenotes on his mid-sixties records you'll understand exactly why I was apprehensive about this, but this is fantastic.

I'm reading the section on New York at the minute. Short, direct syntax like bullets paid off with the lingering wisdom of hindsight. It's the beaming, effervescent infinity of youth tempered with the pathos of age.

"I put my hands in my pockets and we headed off towards to 6th Avenue. There was a lot of action and people on the street and I watched them go by...In Beyond Good And Evil Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life...I felt like that, too. Somebody told me a few weeks later Cisco had died."

Really quite a beautiful read.

That book sounds really interesting, but Dylan is so fond of self-mytholigising I wouldn't believe a word of it, and that has put me off so far.

No, but in my experience 'truth' is such a letdown when it comes to people like that. I'll never forget the winding disappointment when I found out exactly what Van Morrison meant by 'the pylon'. It leaves an emptiness, i'd really rather not know.

Myth or not, he writes a fanastic memoir.

After finally finishing the third John Simpson book, I'm now just beginning "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" by Susannah Clarke, which my brother gave me for Christmas. Its quite a hefty book though, so I'm not taking it with me on bus rides to and from work, so I'm also reading Nietzsche "Thus spoke Zarathustra", which I only got a little way through at uni due to the distraction of alcyhole, so I'm going back to it now.

don't usually count what i'm reading for study, as they're often so dry and specialist NOONE would read them unless they had to. This one, however, is accessible, endearingly non-academic in style (no footnotes! Not one!), human in content and inherently obsessed with the Victorian bedroom.

Any book with academic aspirations having the detached wit to follow a quote from Margot Asquith regarding her husband's "noble" ability to "withdraw in time" with the aside "More expertly in bed than in politics, perhaps" is such a breath of fresh air it makes me BEAM.

Recommended to anyone with the remotest interest in Victorian society.

I haven't read it in full, though I have every intention of doing so and have read most of it for various academic purposes, this is the best Marxist history I have read. Take it with a cellarful of salt (Edward Thompson had a bigger chip on his shoulder than any of the British Marxists), but the chapter on Methodism and the avoidance of revolution is condescension and bile as an art form.

What's wrong with foot-notes!!?? I'm probably opening myself up to a world of geekiness, but i love footnotes!! Opening up a book (be it non-fiction, a novel, biography..) and finding footnotes... well, it makes me happy.
Hmmm.

oh they piss me off something rotten! Too much crossing of eyes, too much like work.

Obviously they have a significant purpose, but most of the time they're a pretty unnecessary distraction to the reader. The one's I'm used to anyway, 90% of which are sources.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a terrific book, though carrying it around is a bit much. If you hate footnotes, don't go near it though, one of them is four pages long...
Read The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe over the holidays, a good sequel to The Rotters Club.

Its a good job I like foot-notes! (see earlier post...). Also, only about 20 pages in and she mentions Mrs Radcliffe!! How cool is that! I bugged my town library for ages to get me The Mysteries of Udolpho, and when they finally found me a copy, it was all torn and battered, the way a gothic novel should be. Disappointed in the book itself though.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

Only about 50 pages in at the moment, but this bit of writing has already blown me away:

"This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screen their obscure operations from your sight."

Reminds me of the last paragraph of Dubliners - fucking fantastic. Yum.

In a manner of speaking.

Finally got round to reading The Rotters Club after I got it for Christmas. It is terrific, isn't it? Mine was a TV tie-in edition, it looks like it's coming to BBC2 soon. Hopefully it'll be their great adaptation for the year, after The Long Firm last year.

Was the Long Firm the one with Mark Strong as a big gangster man?? I watched the first one with Derek Jacobi and really really liked it, but I couldnt be bothered with the rest.. not sure why... Like Mark Strong though, quite devilish, but he's very good as Mr Knightley in Emma.