Reading Block and Possible Cures
I am having trouble settling on a book. 
I keep starting things, getting 50 pages in, then losing interest. It's nothing to do with the books themselves, I think it might be me. I want to read all of these books, I really do. I know enough about the characters to care what happens to them. It's just that my brain seems to want to wander off in its own direction and think about... cake or cats or aeroplanes or aardvarks or honey or hats. Anything, it seems, other than what I've been reading.
I think the only course of action is to put everything down, move them all away from the bedside table, where they are growing into a menacing pile threatening to teeter over and bash me on the head, and pick up Mrs Dalloway or Jane Eyre. They are my favourite books, I can practically recite them, and they might be just what I need to kick me back into reading shape.
Also, I bought The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore this weekend, so a few short stories might be excellent therapy too. Wish me luck!
for, but this weekend, I say here and now, will not see a jot of MA work being done. This will be the first weekend for bloody ages where I have had to either study, go to a work thing, have anyone to stay, or just generally have plans. We have no plans at all, absolutely nada between Friday evening and Monday morning. And do you know what we plan to do? Nothing. Sweet, beautiful nothing. 
Sally Brampton is a journalist who started on Vogue, went on to work for The Observer, and then was one of the founding editors of Elle in the UK. She has also suffered from depression to the extent that she attempted suicide. She recently published a book called Shoot the Damn Dog, which is a memoir of her illness, and the ways in which she tried to overcome it. Don't panic, this isn't your misery memoir! This is a thoughtful, intelligent book that states right at the beginning: "My depression is not better or worse than anyone else's." As soon as I read that line (which I may have misquoted slightly because I don't have the book in front of me as I type) I knew I would love this book. So often people act the martyr to depression, and make a show of it, which is something I've never understood. Depression isn't glamorous, having it does not make you more interesting, or "deep", or creative, or mysterious, contrary to what some would have you believe. It is a horrible, sneaking illness that can quite literally destroy people.
spoke about the "fashions" that have permeated depression and its treatments over centuries. The talking cure, the rest cure, the surgical cure, and so on, right up to the fact that the government are currently investing a great deal of money into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and trying to train up 4,000 new counsellors. Which is great and everything, don't get me wrong, but CBT doesn't actually work for everyone. So where does that leave the rest of us, especially those of us that can't afford private therapists at £50 an hour. Women, too, have largely been the guinea pigs for these treatments, as women have historically had a higher rate of diagnosis of mental illness than men, which leads into all sorts of feminist questions, but I shant bore you here. Above all it sounds like the ideal follow-on read from Elaine Showalter's seminal book The Female Malady, which is up there in my Top 10 Favourite Books Ever Ever Ever. I don't think Lisa Appignanesi takes a specifically feminist approach, but it is no bad thing to read from different perspectives. I'm looking forward to it. Marjorie Wallace was also a wonderful speaker in her own right, and I'm determined to find out more about her - most of the mental health charity things I have looked into have been organised by MIND, so SANE isn't something I know a lot about... yet.
Today, I am a little behind. Being stuck in bed for a week meant that I whizzed through a few books because frankly I was incapable of doing anything other than reading, sleeping, coughing, and drinking litres of orange squash. In the space of a week, I (finally) finished Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which I'm not planning to review here largely because I can't think of anything intelligent to say about it other than it took me a few chapters to get into it, it's a gory, rollicking, good fun book, the story is really nothing like the film, and if you're into a bit of Victorian weirdness then you could do far worse than to pick this one up. I'm not just saying that because I work for the publisher. Y'all know that I keep my work life and Other Stories life separate unless they genuinely overlap. 
Anonymity by John Mullan. A book about the history of writing under pseudonyms, etc. Women writing under males names, men writing under female names, books like Primary Colours, which are credited simply to "Anonymous". Looks like it'll be an interesting read from the man behind the Guardian Book Club. 
It's very rare that a book makes me cry real, actual, physical tears, but Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith had me sobbing like a Brownie. Tears of happiness I might add: tears of happiness for the characters, and tears of happiness because the novel itself, the words Ali Smith had written, were just perfect.
There have been several biographies of Clapton written over the years, authorised and unauthorised, a few of which I’ve read. So when I heard there was to be an autobiography, I was naturally interested to read what the man had to say about his own life. No one could deny that he has led an interesting life, or that as a guitarist he has been enormously influential, and the biographies covered these aspects satisfactorily enough, even going into some detail about the making of albums or what guitars and amplifiers Clapton used at various points in his career. They also presented a fairly sympathetic view of him as a thoughtful, modest person without glossing over his fairly well publicised problems with drugs and alcohol, not to mention his pursuit and eventual marriage to Patti Boyd, George Harrison’s then wife. 
Congratulations to Glasgow writer (and stand up comedienne) AL Kennedy for scooping the Costa Prize last night, for her novel Day.
Max Raphael is the new Deputy Superintendent at a provincial asylum outside London. Stella, his beautiful, gregarious, intelligent wife is suffocating in her marriage. She embarks on a intense and dangerous affair with patient Edgar Stark, who is incarcerated for murdering his wife and then mutilating her corpse. 
You know when you have a kind of stressful day and all you want is comfort? To hell with trying to stretch yourself, with reading lists, and the TBR pile. What you need is something familiar that you can almost recite without the words in front of you.
There are hundreds of reading challenges peppering the blogosphere, and until now I have always given them a bit of a swerve. The idea of having another set of reading prescribed to me on top of my university work somewhat put me off. However, I have recently come across a challenge called 
Things have being getting a bit spooky over in Kirsty Towers. 
Oh, how I loved The Dreamers.
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