Book Soup

I read all day until the words blur and refuse to stay in place, like lines of crawling ants. This is what I’m reading:

• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (a bit at a time)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Preface to Of Grammatology (also a bit of at a time)
• Paul Kane, Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity
• Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory
• Kevin Hart, The Lines of the Hand; Your Shadow; Peniel (Poems. This is more fun.)

And pretty soon, I aim to start on The Cloud of Unknowing, some more books about Derrida and some stuff by Maurice Blanchot. I stupidly left in Leeds a couple of very important titles: The Trespass of the Sign and Flame Tree, both by Kevin Hart. My housemate posted them to me on Monday, we’ll see when they arrive.

My bed-time reading is The Solid Mandala, by Patrick White. I don’t like White much, on the whole, but I feel obliged to get to know his work better (he’s Australia’s only Nobel laureate). I forced myself through Tree of Man aged sixteen, and have never recovered. That said, I read Riders in the Chariot around the same time, over a breathless Easter weekend (appropriately), and just adored it. More recently I read Voss and enjoyed that in a way. So. There’s hope yet. Last night I gave up on everything and buried myself in The Absolute Sandman, which I had rather extravagantly bought for the lovie’s birthday a few months back. You can’t beat fantasy, in the end… And pictures. Pictures are nice.