All those words drunk deep along with dusty sunshine, on the red tile verandah of a whitewashed house.
“.. Grasshoppers rattling like dry paper in hot weeds…”
I sat outside each morning to feel the sunlight slide round the side of the house and watch a slinky litter of kittens play in the almond trees below.
Skimmed the surface of the pool of dead rose petals and moths.
The sides were cracked, the water was green but cool.
One day I came nose to nose with a perfectly tiny wriggling S – a lizard that needed scooping from the water.
And I kept reading, more than I have in a long while.
(Fresh squeezed orange juice, two fruits a glass)
I like the way the threads of stories tangle in a mind that’s empty of any work day urgency.
My head annoys me. I have the kind of mind that reads quickly, inhales the chapters, lives entirely in the world of the book, and then in the days that follow, loses too much of it too fast. I berate myself even as I plunge into the next first chapter in the pile. Addicted, sometimes sated.
“… the sound of ice cubes hitting the bottom of the glass tracing the very contours of silence…”
Sonetimes I slow myself down, deliberately alternating chapters of a juicy novel and some tougher prose.
“We can function in the world only because we are embedded in the scaffold of culture.”
I need to pull up from rushing through impressions, by stepping into the kind of muscular argument that the brain has to chew more slowly.
(Coarse bread, olive oil, fresh tomatoes, salt.)
“…Getting on for a quarter of US debt is held by the Chinese government…”
“..America is sober, Britain is legless…”
(Cold Alhambra beer)
So – hours spent with books high in a village in the mountains in the south of Spain. No watch. No deadlines. No demands.
“… There’s no substitute for the process of trying on different lives, and waiting to find one that fits…”
Only the distractions of food and wine and splashing with a small boy in the water. Most of the drama comes off the page.
“… A voice shouts ‘Fire!’ Whereupon someone does”.
“…Die then, said Leda, and went on to win the Gold…”
“..I fired. My shot went high.. But it was enough to save John Kennedy’s life…”
No noise unless Atalbeitar’s villagers came out on the plaza below us on a hot night.
The first Sunday, the sounds of fiesta echoed up the valley in the sticky small hours of the morning. It made me think – it’s not my space, it’s theirs; I’m only camping; and soon it will be time to leave.
By the end it was cooler in the morning and at night and it felt like time to go home.
NOTES
Capital – John Lanchester
The Fall – Claire McGowan
Canada – Richard Ford
Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
Mr Peanut
11.22.63 – Stephen King
Skios – Michael Frayn
The Cookbook Collector – Allegra Goodman
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens – David Brooks
Wicked Women – Fay Weldon
Notes on Them and Us – Justin Webb
Britain etc. – Mark Easton
September 13, 2012 at 11:04 am
Thank you for reading the news this morning, you’ve made my day, you are my favorite BBC News presenter, I hope that you are on every morning.
September 21, 2012 at 9:35 am
Thank you!
October 23, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Books in paper, or in electronic format?
October 24, 2012 at 8:59 am
I took them all on Kindle … though there are still some that feel much better in paper. Wish I’d bought Hillary Mantel as a physical book, as I have Wolf Hall on my bookshelf and Bring up the Bodies only in the cloud!
November 7, 2012 at 4:46 am
Correction – there are some that look better on paper, specifically the more highbrow books. I use Kindle for all of my guilty pleasures/trashy books. I use the physical books for the more serious and worthy/wordy books, the books to impress people with, or to have on my bookshelf. That’s the great thing about Kindle.
October 24, 2012 at 11:25 am
Interesting quotes. do you belive in supernatural things?