Whinge. Ignore at leisure....
Well, I started this blog to talk about books, and whinge about life with kids. I seem to have done lots of the former, and not that much of the latter. Not that I'm really going to change that with this post, but the topic I'm going to whinge about is kid related...
At this point I'm at the significantly uncomfortable stage of pregnancy. I've been quite large for a while, but now all of the muscles are starting to complain that they have had quite enough of this excess load bearing, and will I do something about it please. Yesterday, in preference. But that isn't the thing that is bugging me. The one aspect of pregnancy that really gets me is the phrase "how long". Said by all sorts of people. Frequently the same set of people. Many times a day. Rarely the same people in the same day, but it's amazing how short peoples' memories can be. Okay, so I probably would fit in this category as well (but at least I have a vague idea of which month my friends are due to have their babies (I hope)).
I'm starting to reply with gritted teeth. I've also taken to randomising the number that I give out, just to see if anyone notices. The official due date is three weeks away. Which means in practical terms, anything from now until Easter is normal. Given that I've had two kids born post their 'official' date, I expect this one will be just as bad. Which is going to be hell for my social life at Easter, given that there are any number of things that I'm going to want to be doing other than recovering from birth. *whinge*
I do understand that there are only so many comments that people want to make. And there is a small set of questions that everyone wants to know the answers to. And that given that I am currently a student at a university I worked at for four years, I'm likely to keep running in to people who don't know, and still want the answers to those question. But geez. It's like the dilemma of meeting up with a friend with obvious signs of injury/illness, when you haven't heard the story - do you ask? do you comment on the situation? or do you pretend not to have noticed? After all, if no-one notices, it's just as bad.
I'd be tempted to put the answers to that set of questions here, if only I thought it would disseminate to all of the people who were going to ask....
So, to books
I've been involved with a book club for a while now, a fact that I may or may not have mentioned in previous waffles (the kind that don't come with syrup). And I'm beginning to develop a hypothesis. Any book picked for bookclub, whether it is something I want to read, or to reread, is going to be slow going, and possibly less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. The fact that I have a deadline slows me right down. And I'm a somewhat voracious reader. Maybe it's the effect of reading going from being an escape to a task? (Although, having said that, I excuse the amount I read by the fact that I'm going to read every book I own, come hell or high water, at least until death gets in the way). I really should find out whether other people in the group have a similar reaction....
And then there is the problem with classic books. We've read a few of them over time, some of which I read when younger, and some of which I didn't. Similarly for other people in the group. There is this interesting trend (for which I have absolutely nothing like enough data) to suggest that the people who are most likely to dislike the classic in question are the ones who have just read it for the first time. Those of us who encountered them in our impressionable teenage years (or younger, in the case of
Alice in Wonderland) find that our nostalgic memories hold out reasonably well.
There is one particular facet of this - the problem that classics tend to have become absorbed into pop-culture. By the time a thirty something well-read over-educated person gets to read a given classic, they've already encountered enough rip-offs, rewrites, homages, parodies, etc, to have formed strange perspectives on the material. And this may possibly be made much worse for books that have been popular enough to have had films/tv-series made of them.
All of which was supposed to have added up to something, but I find that I've lost momentum/coherence of thinking, so, in the manner of all good math texts, I'll leave the conclusions to the reader.
