Other people’s words about … reading
After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t fully understand — with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to lighting up and the first few drags — after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with and then honing in on the exact phrase or phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next.
from ‘Signs of Life‘
by Anna Raverat
I’m not a smoker and I love reading novels far more than I do short stories or poetry, but still, I found myself smiling in recognition when I read the narrator’s description in the passage by Raverat above about her approach to reading. I experience myself, these days, as a greedy reader — greedy for beautiful words, phrases, images, moments, greedy for the fix they give me, while often the plot or theme of a novel remains distant or abstract to me.
Pathway, Sellicks Beach, July 2023.
Reading has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember, though the reasons for its importance to me has varied over the years. These days, it feels like an escape for me from the world, or perhaps more accurately an escape into someone else’s world — that world they create with their words. And, like anyone addicted to their fix, I’m not about to give it up.
Little green bench (a place to read in when the warmer weather returns?)
Sellicks Beach, July 2023.
Lately I’ve been reading …
Today’s reading list is exclusively about animals and pets — for all the animal-lovers out there! xo
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- To have a good life — to reach the highest rung of cat-ness — cats need to go outside: Long-time readers will know that a couple of years ago I rescued a feral cat, who has now become a much-loved member of my household. Before Lizzie came along, I was, as an environmentalist, firmly of the belief that feral cats had no place in Australia, where they are not native animals and where they are responsible for killing many native bird and reptiles. But, as Carrie Arnold writes in this piece, the issue becomes so much more vexed once you have got to know a cat up close. The problem of cats, Arnold concludes, isn’t a cat problem — it’s a human problem. That’s correct, I think. But I also think that what the discussion often misses is the matter of compassion. I want to act compassionately, and compassion is not a hard and fast concept, and rescuing Lizzie was for me an act of compassion despite my environmentalist principles. As I write this, my cat Lizzie is curled up on the quilt on my bed in the space between my knees and the laptop. She’s a happy little thing, and I’m grateful for her presence in my life.
- Why, then, do we consider domestic cats to be loners?: Jonathon B Losos with another piece on cats, this time on how domesticated they may or may not be.
- The status of dogs in India now contrasts sharply with that in Western countries, where any dog found wandering outside on the street is considered stray and liable to impoundment and being killed if not retrieved or rehomed: Krithika Srinivasan and Chris Pearson discuss the free-living dogs of India and how the roots of their treatment lie in … colonialism.
twenty-one words 