Sunday babble

About 100 pages into The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Hard work but I think I've settled into it verbosity and mad digressions. Keep telling myself that I've read Ulysses so, hey, I can fucking read anything.

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I went to the The British Fantasy Open Night last night on the flimsiest of pretexts - my chum Jai Clare invited me. Got drunk, talked to some interesting fantasy writers, chatted up a nice auburn-haired film producer, joked that I could be the next Hugh Grant or Jude Law, gave her a phone number, possibly mine. Feeling a bit sluggish today.

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Had a dream that the house I lodge in was some sort of boarding school except the internal layout was completely different - but it was the house I lodge in. Anyway, the cleaner managed to utterly humiliate me in front of my fellow pupils by pointing out that my bed linen stank of cum.

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My resolution to stop buying books until I substantially reduced my "to read" pile has failed abysmally. Awaiting my attention once I have concluded my business with Mr. Shandy are:

• Other Voices by Andrew Humphrey
• The Complete Enderby by Anthony Burgess
• The Famished Road by Ben Okri
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
• L'Assommoir by Émile Zola
• La Bete Humaine by Émile Zola
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Turn of the Screw / The Aspern Papers (Omnibus) by Henry James
• The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson
• London Orbital by Iain Sinclair
• Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart
• Continent by Jim Crace
• Pesthouse by Jim Crace
• In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin
• Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality by John Gribbin
• The Major Works by Jonathan Swift
• Palm Sunday / Welcome To The Monkey House (Omnibus) by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
• Two Tall Tales and One Short Novel by Lucy Fry, Heidi James and Kay Sexton
• The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
• Plays And Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Luis Bunuel: New Readings by Peter William Evans
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
• Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980-95 by Tom Paulin
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now by William H. Calvin

Utterly ridiculous, isn't it. Still, it makes for an artificially long blog post.