What I Haven’t Been Reading Lately

Mostly, I haven’t been reading Neal Stephenson’s novel Quicksilver. I haven’t been altogether consistent in not reading it, however, and have managed about a hundred and twenty pages in the course of the past month: at which rate I should have the whole thing read by the end of next May. This is a book whose setting (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) and whose subject (the emergence of the new natural philosophy and with it the modern scientific worldview) ought to be of great and immediate interest to me. And so they are, but this has done nothing to hasten my progress. In mitigation, it is a dauntingly long book, or rather the first of a series of three dauntingly long books. In further mitigation, the UK edition is so cheaply and nastily made, and printed on such poor-quality paper, that it is almost a displeasure to hold the thing.

There have, meanwhile, been times when, tired of not reading Quicksilver, I have instead turned to not reading the copy of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Nautical Chart that my colleague Mr N________ gave me in return for one of the items in my latest book giveaway. More seldom still, I haven’t been reading Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering Evidence. Behind all these inactions lies another, fainter but more persistent one: I haven’t been reading Proust, either.