Reasons Passing Understanding

I'm not sure what it is that makes someone want to send their thoughts out into the ether (especially when that ether is wildly unlikely to respond in any way, shape or form). Possibly boredom, or curiosity, maybe something to do with having eaten too many peanut m&ms... At any rate, here we are.

The pressure to be profound is fairly daunting, but I'm sure I'll get over, certainly it as this slips into the kind of drivel that, let's face it, comes from eating too many m&ms....is it me, or do the blue ones really taste differently to the others? In the UK, I know, the orange smarties are sought after, having honest-to-goodness orange-flavoured chocolate in the middle, and....oh yes. Profundity.

I love the rain. Most people find this strange, but I've always found something really exciting and, at the same time, comforting about the rain. Something about its enveloping quality -- suddenly you're shielded from the rest of the world and its expectations, and it's just you. I've been on the sides of mountains in a rain storm and never felt more alive. Wet, yes, and cold, but alive. And that kind of vitality is hard to come by, isn't it?

Right now I'm reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (wonderful writer, specialising in magical realism). Now, apart from making me sound very clever (mildly true) and well-read (slightly less-true - I haven't even read Oliver Twist), it is in fact a wonderfully-told story. Isn't it strange how so few words, when constructed expertly, can invoke such a precise image in your head? Suddenly you're in that Caribbean town, smelling the warm air, hearing the lap of the ocean, feeling the stone streets beneath your feet... Vikram Seth can do the same thing with India.

My current reading list (which I felt I should put down somewhere concrete, or at least a little more concrete than "in my head") looks a little like this:

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth (if you haven't read A Suitable Boy, do so now)
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Peter Pan by JM Barrie (urge to read the actual tale rather than subsist on the Disney versions)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (recommended)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared M Diamond
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway
How Late it was, How Late by James Kelmen (purely on the title)
The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm (ditto)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (how is it I've missed reading this?)
Howard's End by E M Forster
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (purely and simply because I feel I should)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ok, I'll admit, there are more, but this is getting embarassing. Time to get to work though. First step, finishing the 100-or so page-long Chronicle... Good lord. Must get it together.

To that end, I'll sign off. Next time, poetry.

O