Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary - and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.
- Alice Munro,
Chance, in
RunawayI'm really enjoying Alice Munro's short story collection,
Runaway. Jonathan Franzen says in the introduction: "Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I've made, the things I've done and haven't done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death." It's the same for me too, and it makes for engrossing reading which enables me to forget my surroundings; a very good thing as I read it on the train to and from work.
Runaway is my commuting book and Claire Tomalin's
Jane Austen: A Life is my evening/weekend book (amongst many others that I really should've finished by now, including Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf). I had intended to read Tomalin's biography after I'd read all of Austen's novels, but I just couldn't resist it. So far I've particularly enjoyed reading about Jane as a child: she was shy, yet "tough and unsentimental, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes", and that she responded to a series of books by Arnaud Berquin, which were fiercely moralising and bland, by writing plays and stories that were full of "farce, burlesque and self-mockery...bursting with life and energy."
***
The Arts Council
have announced their funding decisions for 2008-11. Many organisations have had their funding cut and will have to close; others, such as the Orange Tree Theatre, Bush Theatre and
Bristol Old Vic are at least partially saved. I'm so relieved about Bristol Old Vic; the idea that it may not have existed at all in the near future was just absurd.
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* which I should be finishing off right this moment...