Multiple Reading Personalities

I feel like the rabbit from Alice these days, running after time as the list of things I should be doing, should already have done and should do very soon keep getting longer and longer. On this blog, for instance… I still want to rework its appearance quite substantially – not until this is done will I feel like sharing it with anyone.

And then, there are the recent reads I need to summarize here:

• The Great Gatsby (love you, Fitzgerald)
• Electre (in its Giraudoux French version)
• the Oreisteia from Aeschylus
• Beowulf (in the wonderful Seamus Heaney translation)
• Pamela (oh Richardson, how I had to battle to get through the book!)
• and Frankenstein!

Then there are the books I should read for “literary education” purposes – maybe Paradise Lost will be next. I started a few weeks ago but put it aside recently without even realizing it (I have been reading mostly from my new Kindle, and Paradise Lost I own as a physical book). On the other hand, I have been trying to nurture my flailing creativity recently – I had been writing a fantasy novel, but about 3 weeks ago, about 35,000 words into it (and while I know what should happen next), it just started refusing to be written. I am trying to get my imagination started on it again by nourishing it with fairy tales and other fantasy works that I think might be relevant, but so far no luck.

At least it’s led me to reading old Breton legends, which I find fascinating. They are a part of a culture that was my grandparents’, but that was never passed on in my family – reading them almost feels as if I was remembering long-forgotten childhood memories.