I have more books on the go then I’ll ever be able to realistically finish before I go to Shanghai in less than 2 months. Christopher Hill’s Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England has been a pleasure to pick away at everytime I go home. He writes so close to the bone of the sources, with a tone almost conversational without losing dignity, and a great deal of precision. It is a transparent sort of history writing, he never hides that it is a construction built from disperate sources, cohesion comes from his mastery, his ability to be in conversation with all these sources and put them all into conversation with each other. I rarely read history this well written. Although I have no idea of the books current relevance in the scholarship of the English revolution, reading it for the gist of things, and for an education in history writing is more than enough. I’ll finish it, and the rest of the beautiful Verso editions of Hill, one day, maybe in a year or so.

I have also picked back up The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado De Assis, after a year or two of letting it lie fallow, enjoying it much more the second time around, very funny, would love to read it in Portugues one day. Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories is another book I have been picking through, inspired by Sebald’s essay on him in A Place In The Country, its quite incredible, written clever and loose and casual, funny, straightforward and insightful, a real joy. I’ll have to pick up some more by him. Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read one is another book that, despite being its short length, I had abandoned for a few years. It’s nice, has a infectious passion for sentences. Seeing great writing pointed out, only makes it more obvious how hard it is to achieve and I return to this book whenever I get that spasm of dissatisfaction with my own writing, which is often. Nobody expects academic history to be written that well, as far as I can tell, so the issue is not so pressing. I will improve, slowly, slowly, as I go. I’ve also been picking away at the Standard Ebooks edition of Three Men In Boat which I downloaded on a whim sitting by a river and watching men in boats. Amusing so far, reminds me of watching Live at the Apollo, a lot of well worn (they might not have been well worn at the time) obversational comedy.

The big undertaking I have embarked upon in the last couple weeks is reading all of In Search of Lost Time, which I downloaded to my phone a couple months ago. It is something I have been toying with for some time, and it seemed the perfect time to begin with me going to China so soon, and once I get there I’d like to finally throw myslef fully into reading Chinese books which I have dipped my toes into before on so many occassion but never really dedicated myself to. In Search of Lost Time will be a good way to keep myself sane by not throwing away reading in English completely, and it’ll keep me busy for some time. Halfway through Swann’s Way now, enjoying it immensely. Proust is a magician.

As far as Chinese reading, I started 一个人的圣经 yi ge ren de shengjing by 高行健 Gao Xingjian, on a friend’s recommendation, but haven’t had time to make much headway in it yet.