Dream Theories

Since I haven't written anything on this blog in such a long time, the first new post was going to be a photo montage of all the things I've been doing since I posted last. Unfortunately, all of the photos from the past month and a half were moved to an external hard drive before I got around to posting them, so until I find out how to access them you'll have to be content with text alone.

For the most part, the reason I haven't been posting is that I've been doing other things, such as baking, cooking holiday dinners, catching up with Battlestar Galactica in anticipation of the season 4.5 premiere, writing the middle third of a novel (I haven't written the first third yet- I'm trying not to be bothered by that and not entirely succeeding), and, of course, reading. After tallying up my reading for 2008, I discovered that of the 234 books I read only 18 were non-fiction (I am aware that I have no life). This year my goal is to read more non-fiction, beginning with actually finishing the many non-fiction books I begin and then forget, so in January so far I've read a collection of Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing called Words of Mercury, and I'm in the middle of both Owen Chadwick's book on the Reformation and a book about hedgehogs. Of course, I've also re-read Tender is the Night, finished re-reading Richard Wilbur's collected poems, and finished reading Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes' anthology The Rattle-bag. I've read three books about eccentric family highjinks on the Yorkshire coast (Hilary McKay's Porridge Hall books), three books that are addendums to well-known fantasy series (Philip Pullman's Lyra's Oxford and Once Upon a Time in the North and J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beadle the Bard), and two books about alchemical space travel in the Victorian period (Philip Reeve's Larklight and Starcross). On reflection, it's probably no surprise that I have strange and sometimes terrible dreams- what a mish-mash to put inside one head.