Virginia Woolf - Selected Diaries, Sylvia Plath - Journals 1950-1963, Tolstoy Letters Vol I and Vol II, James Joyce - Ulysses, In Our Time (podcast), Tom Drury - Hunts In Dreams

There's a kind of Brownian motion to life that randomly buffets you in myriad small and large ways, directing you down this path, down that. On my own for two weeks I get up between 6.45 and 7.15 am then walk into town for coffee, listening to New Yorker short stories or In Our Time podcasts, or just walking for the familiar sights and smells and for the sense of power that I get from my legs (really!), propelling me along.  Today I listened to In Our Time on James Joyce's Ulysses and so I've picked up my re-reading of it again - there's something so luscious and so peaceful and so energetic all at the same time about Joyce's prose.

You can't say the same about Sylvia Plath's Journals, least not about any of the entries for 1950 that I have been reading - well there is lusciousness, there is energy, but there is no peace. It is the fiercely intelligent journal of an adolescent girl / woman who is aware of her powers, her desires, the social and cultural straps with which she is bound, and she is bursting to get out of them, but she knows she can't, she knows/thinks/ rationalizes that she must wait. Wait for what? Well that's the dilemma of adolescence and early adulthood but made so poignant in the light of her eventual suicide as an adult just thirteen years later.

The Tolstoy letters and the Woolf diaries I have just bought and I'm just reading odd snippets. I've bought the last volume of the collected Virginia Woolf diaries as well as the selected diaries which is a bit of overkill.  But then buying Sylvia Plath's Journals and Tolstoy's collected letters ( 2 volumes) on consecutive days is a bit of overkill as well. There's a little bit of time left to read Hunts in Dreams, but only a little, so I have to keep backtracking to remember what happened and who is who - lucky it's a real book and not an ebook.

and - Linda Grace Hoyer - The New Yorker Magazine

And who is Linda Grace Hoyer? - why John Updike's mother. I've just printed out three of her stories from the New Yorker magazine, published in 1966, 1969 and 1983, so within the working writing life of John Updike. They stand up well though. What's strange is how they describe the same farm / small holding that John Updike describes in The Centaur, the atmosphere is so much the same - in a good way, not in a copying sort of way. The stories are all based on a woman Belle's childhood and then her relationship with her husband, George and they are beautifully paced with dialogue and image.

The Magician's Guild - Trudi Canavan, Letters of Virginia Woolf (vol 6)

Every so often I want something escapist and easy to read, often in the Sci Fi fantasy line, so I picked up The Magician's Guild in the second hand bookshop at Fiveways, still one of the best 2nd bookshops there is. It's readable and I feel a bit miserly and in saying that it's well enough written as it's got a good flowing style and nothing that makes yo think "ew" don't write that. There is some problem with scale which always happens with these kind of novels - the protagonist is often young and poor, in a an authoritarian country, with minor tyrants in the domestic setting and bigger tyrants ruling above. Often this is dealt with by making the hero work in the kitchens of a huge ruling castle. Canavan adopts the ruling city approach, and actually makes the "tyrants" - the Magicians - a mixture of hateful and sympathetic characters which is interesting, but the problem of scale does arise - just how powerful are the wizards ( and the king they rule for), and where are the larger scale politics? That said I'm enjoying it, it's a Lord of the Rings level read, intelligent enough without being stretching. It feels like I'm damning it with faint praise, but that isn't my intent.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf (vol 6) I picked up in the Open Market bookshop - more geared to first editions and the literary pile, and it's fascinating, and makes me think how much we've lost by having phones and email and Skype instead of letters.

The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber - a time to read and a time to..., Bridge of Spies

I finished reading The Book of Strange New Things this morning, sitting in bed for an hour and a half because I didn't need to get up, and it is one of those books that draws you in deeper and tighter as you read - in some respects. One of the other of those respects is the letters that the protagonist, Peter - a missionary on a far off planet- and his wife, Beatrice, left back on a social disintegrating earth of buffeted by the effects of global warming, exchange are written as those characters may have written  - so there's no literary beauty, there are even typos, and they are the inadequate scribblings of two people trying to communicate across a vast distance. It makes them something that I read quickly, speed read, skim, like you do an article that doesn't interest you much, but you do need to get the gist of the story, you do need to take it all in. It's curiously unsatisfying, but necessary for the book as a who;e - the rest of the writing is clear and satisfying by contrast, striking in its building up of the incidental and the important, compelling in both description and narrative. It has no answers though. I thought that it might have, that it might produce some new and illuminating perspective from which I could learn new and strange things.

It's been a day like that. Now I'm watching Bridge of Spies, and taking breaks from it to have snacks, with writing this, even play games of Hearthstone, in the way that you can't if you are watching with somebody else. Bridge of Spies is satisfying, it's moral dilemmas are clear and distinct, and the lawyer defending the Russian spy is straight up and honorable, unwilling to break his client confidentiality to satisfy the CIA, he is decided that if he is to represent this client, he will not compromise the values, rules and the Constitution. It's well photographed, the steely blues and rain of the spy movie, the warm ochres of home scenes sit well on the eye.