Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading
Has lockdown affected your choice of reading material?
Not especially. My reading has always been fairly broad. As a part-time PhD student much of my reading relates to my research. I’ve never read fiction in a big way, though I do have some favourite authors (including Iris Murdoch). I tend to eke out reading the works of dead authors: reading the last one and realising there won’t be any more is a dreadful feeling.
I have always been a “chain reader” from as long as I can remember, reading everything, even labels in the bathroom!
I went on a few tours by the brilliant and sadly deceased former road sweeper and tour guide Allan Brigham, and remembered a few “hidden places of Cambridge”, such as the sign near the Grafton Centre showing the location of an old women’s refuge, and how he said: “This shows the history of the real…
In late March 2020, as the first lockdown began, my reading didn’t quite come to a halt, but it definitely slowed down dramatically; I went from getting through two or three books a week (I’d managed ten in both January and February) to struggling to finish one.
I have increased my rate of reading during lockdown, and have definitely enlarged my choice of genre.
If not for lockdown would I ever have taken up the gauntlet and turned to Fantine, the first tome (of five) of “a sort of essay on the infinite,” as Victor Hugo called Les Misérables?
At first more, because of all the extra time freed up by not commuting.
Started off less – used to read on frequent train journeys to babysit grandsons or up to London for ballet etc [sob] – so frequent reading stopped when that stopped.
The thing that has kept me going during all three lockdowns has been the British tv drama series Life on Mars, first unleashed on our tv screens 15 years ago in January 2006. I somehow managed to miss it then, but discovered it, thanks to my son, during the first lockdown during the spring of 2020.
I have read a bit more than usual during lockdown.
