almost time for new year resolutions

I've been thinking again about blogging and its appeal, especially when one's blog is unread. There has to be a space for recording the reading one does, since I for one read something in some form for just about 90% of my waking day. That's scary. Where does it all go, especially when, like Nora Ephron, I REMEMBER NOTHING.

So, although it's a little premature, I am making a New Year resolution to record more of what I read, for my memory bank, for others if they ever find me here, tucked cosily away under a weird name, and as a reference tool, in case I need the name of a book or article. A friend of mine has been blogging publicly every week for almost nine months of this year. It's part of his job but it makes him buy a book a week, read it then write about it. I so enjoy reading about his reading and it's a wonderful service to those of us who are reading other books yet are interested in other things to read.

I have had a spate of successful reading over November with far and away the best book being Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor, about John Synge and told through the voice of Molly Allgood who was also the actress Maire O'Neill and beginning when she is in her sixties, destitute and an alcoholic. It is exquisitely written with Molly's thoughts and words captured in a lilting Irish brogue, funny, sad, beautiful.

Then Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room also captured my imagination. Switching between the first and third person it seems to be a memoir but I suspect it is a "clever" memoir in the same way as Boyhood and Youth are memoirs for JM Coetzee. One is not quite sure. Nevertheless, I found the central character whose name is (wait for it) Damon, sympathetic, easy to relate to, a loner who hates himself for not making the right connections when they make themselves available. It is a book about journeys, not travel, and discoveries about self, also about death and dying.

Finally, Birth by Peter Harris which couldn't be more different in style and tone but what a gripping read, like a thriller. Told from an uncomfortably close perspective, this is the story of how our first democratic election nearly became a national disaster. With the joint forces of the AWB and Inkatha waging a war against the efforts of the Independent Electoral Commission to organise a successful, free and fair election, one reads about the enormous strain, the ungodly working hours and obstacle after obstacle, bomb after bomb, the names of the dead listed like an apocalyptic roll call. It is horrifying. The title refers not only to the birth of the new nation, South Africa, but also to the writer's own twin boys. The two stories, personal and political are nicely interwoven to make this a moving and intensely interesting book.