The year in brief:
Blah, Blah, Blah.
I was tempted to stop there. Greta Thunberg’s words say it all. Anything else is just description.
I could talk about another year of living in fear, and another year of being lied to, and a second pandemic year which is different from the first one because this time we’re not all in it together.
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| December's books. Guess which one's for book group. |
In 2021 I made a new year resolution that I kept. This might be a first. It was to read four books a month.
It doesn’t sound much, and it’s nothing compared to people like Andy Miller, but it gave me the chance to tackle a bit of the feeling I get of “so many books, so little time” every time I go on Books Twitter.
Actually I’ve averaged five. I could have read more, but I don’t live alone, and I feel obliged to spend Quality Time with my husband occasionally.
I can read fast – I sometimes finish a book in one or two sittings – but I don’t think reading fast is necessarily a good thing. It dawned on me some time this year that the time spent reading a book is longer than the time you are physically looking at the pages. There’s the time you spend processing it afterwards. If I ate up books at the rate I did as a child, or went from one book straight to another, I’d lose that.
Last night I watched Our Family and Autism, a BBC One documentary in which Paddy and Christine McGuinness talked about their experience of having three autistic children. It was widely trailed as a heart-warming documentary. For some of us it was more like heart-sinking.