And of the reading of books there is no end

The last essay of the 2005-6 academic year marked. Whoopee! Nearly – as in four days – the end of term. Blogging will return with a vengeance …

And (after a conversation at lunch) this is for all you people who think it’s sinful not to finish a book …

This is what I am currently ‘reading’ (i.e. not reading, dipping into, leafing through, seeing what takes my fancy, photocopying and scrutinizing, putting on the back burner, re-reading, re-re-reading, and so on …):

Emily Dickinson’s ‘Collected Poems’, three books by Rebecca Solnit (Muybridge & West Coast artists & Getting Lost), those volumes by Graham Foust & Devin Johnston, A.N. Whitehead’s ‘Process & Reality’, ‘Imagination Verses’ (Moxley), recent copies of the LRB and New Statesman (both of which seem to be increasingly dull), the one before recent Chicago Review (which, by contrast, is really interesting), lyrics to songs by ‘The Fall’, ‘The Odyssey’ (Fagle translation), various back issues of ‘The Wire’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rumplestiltskin’, ‘Goldilocks & The Three Bears’, Emma Chichester Clark’s ‘Blue Kangaroo’ books, anything with Quentin Blake’s name on the cover (bedtime stories for my kids), Joseph Ceravolo poems, Dick Gallup poems, bits & pieces of Ted Berrigan, my notebooks from 1995 onwards, daily dipping-intos of Blogs by Lisa J, Ron S, Josh C, Shanna C, Joseph Beuys’ Hat, HCE, eod, and anyone else I happen on, not forgetting ‘Moby Dick’ which I ran aground in last summer & will resume on Saturday (some books come around like planets), or any one of several books on Joseph Cornell (ditto) …

… some books are upstairs, some are downstairs, some come with me for a day, some sit by the bed, some have pencil marks in them, some glare across the room at me …

Who ever could have told me when I was a little chap in NHS prescription glasses “you can’t start a new book until you’ve finished the one you’re reading now" ? What a misunderstanding of reading and how books like to talk to one another.