Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

I seem to be going through one of my periodical unable to settle with a book phases. I have a large number of books on my reading list and at least three on the go at the moment – though I think that I may have run out of steam with Kate Fox’ Watching the English about two thirds of the way through. What seemed funny and informative at the beginning now seems drab and repetitive. Back to the shelf with that one, I think.

Somewhere in the living room – on the shelf near my chair, I think – I have the half-read Eleanor of Aquitaine by Allison Weir. Considering the lengths I went to to get it (I seem to have purchased it between print or distribution runs), I really ought to plough on with it. The trouble is, it’s just that at the moment: plough. It’s not badly written or anything, though she does make a lot out of relatively thin contemporary documentation, but my mind set isn’t quite right for a learned tome right now and it is a rather poorer book than McLynn’s Lionheart and Lackland, which inspired me to look it out.

That brings me to the book in my bag at the moment. A novel that I started about ten days ago. I am on page 23. I was on page 23 ten days ago. The theory was that I should read it on the Tube in to work and again on the way home, but as it transpires, I just want to doze on the way in and I do the Times sudoku on my way home. At home I play Civ or watch the telly. Or doze.

Past experience suggests that this phase will last another two or three weeks and then suddenly all my reading buds will perk up again and I’ll be off…

I can now add to my reading list two Alexandre Dumas books I've never encountered in English translation before: The Women's War available in Penguin Classics, is set in the opening years of the reign of Louis XIV and centres on two women, supporters of Anne of Austria and the Condé respectively. I had never realised just how much Dumas likes his naive Gascon soldiers before, either; there another (hopefully not d'Artagnan) in this book, who fancies both women.

This is the first new English translation for 150 years apparently, which will account for why I've never seen it before.

The second book has never been translated into English before it seems, and is called One Thousand and One Ghosts and sees Dumas dealing with vampire victims, a man who is over 275 years old and a man who was bitten by the head of his guillotined wife.

Sounds a hoot.

Anyone who knows me already appreciates how hard I find it not to acquire new books. I can pick them up infinitely faster than I have the capacity to read them, even when I have plenty of spare time. It's almost like the literary equivalent of fattening up over summer so that I can get through winter. Except that I am hoping that such a winter is a long way off yet.

In addition to my current reading list which includes finishing off The Vesuvius Club and then starting The Devil In Amber, both by Mark Gatiss, finishing off Children of Hurin by Tolkein (which is pretty much what I expected it would be), Zulu by Saul David, starting The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, and Alibi by Joseph Kanon, I have others newly acquired or re-found.

I really don't know when I shall find the time to read them (and as I type this up, I realise there are around ten more downstairs I haven't read.... Hmmm.). Sorting out the cupboard at the weekend, Furtle rediscovered by just started and then misplaced copy of Kennedy: an unfinished life by the wonderfully named Robert Dallek. That goes back into the immediate pile.

For light entertainment, I have Sharpe's Fury by Bernard Cornwell, which in all honesty will probably find its way to the top of the list, followed by The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, world-renowned evangelical atheist(!), Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks, which deals with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the aftermath. I also have a copy of Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre. You may have seen this on advertising hoardings around the place recently; it deals with the improbable but true wartime story of Eddie Chapman, a conman who was caught in Europe by the Germans at the outbreak of war, trained as a spy and parachuted into Britain where he promptly turned himself over to the authorities who inducted him into the double-cross programme. He is and was the only Briton to be awarded the Iron Cross by a grateful Fuehrer... After the war he made a very good living as a crime correspondent for the Daily Telegraph...

On top of that lot, Amazon delivered me a copy of Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild a biography of the darling of the silent screen and original "It" Girl, by David Stenn.

On the less literary front, I also have a nice hardback copy of Marvel's Ultimate Galactus Trilogy to get through, but I don't see that taking too long!

OK; must go. I have to have a shower and then I guess I have some reading to do!