Funfare for the Common Man

9pm every night, after the little one is tucked in for the night With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez After last week’s heavy theme of the [potential] doom and gloom of the future, this week will be a different kind of heavy: heavy on links, light[er] on commentary.  If there’s one thing this quarantine is doing to people – me, especially, but if Twitter is anything to go by, many of us – it’s sending us down all sorts of nostalgia rabbit holes. You know, I’m not really sure if we can go down nostalgia rabbit holes, but you get the idea. I’ve been down this…road before, just a fortnight or so ago with my ‘Mixtape’ post. That, along with some comments from old friends, has really kicked the music nostalgia urge into overdrive, and I’m trying to put together a music-themed post. But I’m struggling to find the right angle. So in the interim, let’s focus on links and love.  As in, this is about the point in the quarantine, if you haven’t reached it already, where tempers are r...

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts.” (Elizabeth Hardwick) In my first post in this series of reflections on reading, I rambled, as I am wont to do, and waxed lyrical on how to find the time to read. Let me just point out the obvious – my ‘strategy’ doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. And I probably didn’t quite make it clear that when it comes to finding the time to read, trying to cram in any type of reading at various points of your day, it very much depends on what exactly you are trying to read. I came across a great article the other day, which is related to another strategy for catching up on reading books: stay completely away from not only social media, but any internet news. Or, you could do like this guy did and read only print newspapers for two months . I love that idea, but problematically, being in Ukraine means getting hold of a daily [print] newspaper in English is pretty challenging. I als...

When it comes to reading, the question I probably get asked more than any other is this: ‘how the hell do you find the time to read?’ More specifically, it’s more along the lines of ‘where do you find the time to read so [damn] much?’ ‘Reading is the best education.’ (Fran Lebowitz) In 2005, I started keeping a meticulous list of what I read, something bibliophiles sometimes refer to as a BOB:  ‘a book of books’. It’s a great snapshot of how reading shapes me during a particular period of my life, or at the very least, a simple way to keep track of what I read. Though I’d heard about this idea long ago, the editor of the NYTBR captures this far more eloquently than I could ever hope to: “Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in My Life With Bob . “Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time.” I can’t tell you the precise figures, b...