In the Book Review/What I'm Reading
The most beautiful American woman, ever.
What am I reading? I seem to have passed into an alternative universe in which the question no longer means anything. I am reading from seven books most weekday mornings; on the weekends, lately, I’ve been finishing off novels. Am I ready to blame this blog for the fact that I read much less than I used to do? What I ought to blame is the Nano. I was up until two-thirty in the morning loading up a new device, in a vain attempt to get things just right. It is some sort of revenge for all my offhand dismissals of modish personal music systems, which I had “outgrown.” Ha. When I told my friend Nom de Plume how childish I was the other night (or early morning), she riposted, “I don’t know about ‘childish,’ but it seems very masculine to me.” A guy and his Nano — ouch!
Meanwhile, I’m listening to Michael Palin’s audiobook of his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, and learning all sorts of things while being hugely entertained on my daily walks. Names, for one thing: “Cleese” rhymes with “please,” not “geese,” and it’s “Palin” with a long “a.” Every time I mention the audiobook to Kathleen, she says, “He’s the one I don’t like,” but this in fact always turns out to be Eric Idle, and of course it was Mr Idle’s characters whom Kathleen didn’t like.
I don’t know which Monty Python routine is my favorite, but the one that Kathleen and I quote most often is, by far, Ann Elk’s theory about the brontosaurus. “And that it is, too, Chris.”