A Quest

I spoke to London Underground this morning and they looked at the refund applications and said they would send me the rest of the money. So that was all very simple.

I also just got an e-mail from the people whose house I am currently living in saying I can be there until 9 February. I will move out before then anyway because I have signed a contract for elsewhere to start the weekend after next but it takes lots of the pressure off to get all my stuff moved, so that’s great.

Anyway, on other matters, lately I have had real trouble finding any decent books to read. I tend to get books out of the library because I have no space for any more books. But I have just read so many bad books of late that I am beginning to wonder if there are any decent ones left. I used to have a policy that if I started a book I had to finish it, but I have decided that life is too short for enduring bad literature and now, whilst I will try and persevere with a book, I will eventually concede if I am find that I am totally bored by the prospect of picking up a book.

I have always been a big fan of reading and when I was really young would sneak onto the landing at night and read my book and then quickly have to sneak back into bed if I heard my parents coming upstairs. I kind of lost my interest in reading when things went downhill with the ex (not sure why that is the case) and have never quite got back into it in the same way.

There have been some books that I have enjoyed reading recently. I read the Da Vinci Code last year and enjoyed that. But I feel the need to say that it is an incredibly badly written book. Every chapter is only a few pages long, presumably to reflect the fact that people have the concentration span of a gnat these days, and each chapter ends with some exceptionally contrived cliff-hanger. I could also see some of the plot twists coming from a long way off. However, despite all of that it was engaging and perhaps the fact that it was easy just to pick it up and ‘go with the flow’ was part of the appeal.

I really like books such as Brave New World and To Kill a Mockingbird and so on. But I have an instant aversion to books by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and the like because of being forced to read them when I was at school. I should perhaps give them another chance though rather than write off an entire period of English literature. I did read Tess of the D’Urbervilles a couple of years ago and quite enjoyed that, but Thomas Hardy certainly does know how to do melodrama and one can only take so many emotional crises in a work of literature.

Finding decent new books to read always seems such a challenge. I like browsing in bookshops, but nothing much seems to jump out at me these days. Books that others seem to rave about I might find mildly engaging. I know several people who thought the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency was excellent, but I somehow didn’t find it anything to make a big fuss about. I have never read any of the Harry Potter books, in part because they have been so hyped that I think I might just, once again, wonder what all the fuss is about but also because there is only one more in the to be published in the series and so if I am going to give them a go and think they are good then I can read them all without having to wait ages for the next instalment to be published.

The quest will continue in the hope that one day I might actually discover that elusive decent book.