Loitering

Though being away from University does suck quite a lot, one thing has made all these months entirely worth it - the space and time to re-read. Of course I'm looking forward to going back (9 weeks and 3 days, though I'm not counting...), but being able to read and re-read has been a luxury for which I'm thankful - Tripos seems to give no quarter, normally. People don't usually believe me when they find out the incalculably vast majority of my 'Literature' reading has been done in the last two years (since starting my course), but it's true - I read fiction until I was about 13, and then read mainly Philosophy, History and Politics, as well as Biology and Physics (lots of Physics) until my university interviews loomed four years later, which point seemed timely to start reading fiction again. (In case you're confused, English wasn't quite my intended career path until just before the university applications had to be finished). I'm not at all bothered by this fact, though it's very often apparent that I'm not as well read as most other Englings, because the historical/political/philosophical background always comes in handy. But it's a fact nevertheless.

With Tripos put aside for a while, then, reading could commence. All that funky sideways stuff that comes up in the course of the Papers but which never gets read because there just isn't time. Making up for lost time. I'm helped and hindered by an insatiable curiosity, with which I got tangled in Frontispiece (June). I've just been able to read anything and everything, and for once really follow up any 'Further Reading' recommendations in the backs of books. It's exciting, really. Exciting and infuriating (despite having unintended time, there still isn't enough of it to get through everything. Obviously). So I've been able to re-read the fairytales I should have been read when I was wee (I never was read them, but got round to doing it myself a few years later - but it means that Cinderella and Ugly Duckling and their ilk aren't part of my unconscious. That may well be for the better - I'm not scared of midnight, nor hopeful about ugliness); and I've been able to read more Beckett. Much more Rushdie and Eco, at last. And lots of the things so many people think are fundamental (and they are, in a way, but they weren't my building-blocks), like the Just So Stories, which I'm sure are much more interesting when read after Conrad, rather than when 6 years old - or at least that's my excuse, now. There have been some new discoveries, too: Auden and Dryden, amongst others. Reading (and the all-important re-reading) more texts by already-discovered and loved authors, in such abundance, is an unexpected treat I won't soon forget.

This might sound like I'm saying goodbye to that luxury, and I suppose in a way I am as Tripos is beginning to get its hooks back into me, and there's a dissertation that needs writing and - more pressingly - reading for. I love Tripos: without it I wouldn't have had such a want to read and read and read; but space away from it has somehow brought it, and what it stands for, closer.

Here seems as good a place as any to list some texts. These are my life-changers so far (though most good books have a very real impact, these have somehow significantly changed my thinking rather than just adding to it). If you don't like lists, look away now - I just feel like writing one! In no particular order:

• A Room of One's Own, Woolf -- I've read this enough that now I just open it and read it whenever I'm restless or frustrated. It's calming and motivating, and really very funny. I love it for my being able to get something new from it every time. Every Newnhamite should be given a copy of it when they join the College. Maybe I'll start that tradition...
• Paradise Lost, Milton -- It's beautiful, multi-dimensional, infinitely contentious and my 'Desert Island Book'. I can't get over how near-perfect the poetry is, and how vital almost every word. First read it in 6th Form, and it's another of those I can always open and enjoy.
• The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford -- Encountered this, as a two-page extract, in a 1st yr class. I was too curious to let it lie, so read it and againandagainandagain...This wonderful writer is now the subject of my dissertation, but I really need to get past the "This dude does dead good" stage of the argument!
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson -- The themes of this mattered first, and it was only later I realised how well the thing is written. This one was read when I was about 12, and it couldn't have been better timed. It was lent to me by someone who knew me better than I did, then.
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie -- The beginning of my interest in Literature, rather than just books. It's almost certainly this that got me doing English at Newnham, so I'm all for the man's Knighthood.
• The Qur'an -- I read this for the first time a couple of months ago. It'll stay with me. Though I wish I could read Arabic...
• The Henrys (IV, V & VI), Shakespeare -- Pre-University I was scared of what Shakey stood for, and avoided him. Faced with a whole term of his writing in 2006 I decided to just jump right in with the plays that frightened me most and see what happened, and I fell in love. These plays are what did it for me.
• Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard --The beginning of a new world, when I was 13.
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot -- I've always struggled with poetry; I love taking it apart and seeing how it works, but I don't often feel it. This is probably the first poem that grabbed something sinewy inside me and pulled until I had to give in.

Good books leave themselves in you somehow. Some deposit themselves as whispers of quotations that catch you unawares (like J. Alfred Prufrock); others as tableaus stuck in monochrome (The Handmaid's Tale, particularly, did this. I re-read it yesterday and re-visited all the old pictures, amending some too). Some of them niggle like an Ohrwurm, like this irritating song by 'Peter, Bjorn & John' (I challenge you to listen to it all the way through and then not whistle it...) - Fear and Trembling did this to me. Others draw you back to them with an invisible piece of thread they tied round you at first reading - Room of One's Own always tempts me from the bookshelf. Known books never disappoint, never betray; they change, as we do, but that's okay, that's layering rather than abandonment.