Books! Lovely Books!

I'm proud to say that I have actually read a book over these last ten days. From cover to cover. The past four years of Cambridge have until now utterly killed my ability to read anything to its end, even short newspaper columns. It was the systematic process of being given a reading list of five or six books in preparation for an essay or a presentation and having to read them all by a fixed deadline, usually ten days away. Given all the other translation work etc that we had to do, this meant that I would either only read the recommended chapters, or in the case we actually had to read the whole book, I would skim read it for the most relevant bits. This, combined with that fact that I was either not that interested in many of the topics these books were about, or I was downright bored shitless by them. On getting home I'd immediately divide the total number of pages by the number of days I had to read them to break it down... and then not read them anyway. Not a healthy reading situation.

So in four years, I think I've only read about four novels of my own choice during the holidays and three of those were by Haruki Murakami, so not the most demanding stuff. I've repeatedly walked into bookshops and had to leave promptly because I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that there are so many books I want to read and no time (or basic ability) to read them. I always froze with fear whenever Saara offered me a book to read (which somehow you always have in your handbag, ready to offer whenever we meet up over any given cup of coffee. Though I have to say I was proud to have read the Jon Ronson book you lent me this summer - note, once the heavy hand of Cambridge had released me from its grip - that was the trick you see: if you'd kept them simple, with big type, like Babar or something, I would have read them all.)

So now I'm returning to the halcyon days of my teenage years when I read like crazy. This is made so much easier by the fairly long amounts of time I have to spend on the subway every day in Tokyo, just to cover the pretty large distances from A to B.
I've been reading Noam Chomsky's "Imperial Ambitions," which totally exposes the blinding hypocrisy of the way rich and powerful countries treat weak and poor ones.

Michael Klare's "Blood and Oil" is the one book you need to read if you want to understand why things have come to be the way they are now and how global politics will unfold over the next decade or so (the clue is in the title).

And, knowing that reading another book about how fucked up the world is might send me over the edge, I bought "Carlos Eire's "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" - a beautiful account of a Cuban exile's very intense, magical, at times frightening childhood in Havana at the time the revolution started.

I'm so happy to be reading for myself again!