In August, I’ve been mainly reading. Here are the books I’ve got through, in order, from bottom to top (I’m still mid-way through the Hogg)
The pile looks tidy, with neatly demarcated titles representing neatly discrete reading experiences. But of course in practice the temporality of reading is messier, and less linear, and weirder: things are recalled, loop back, connect, squash together, get misremembered (I’m a big misrememberer: it’s a crucial part of reading). Multiple titles move around our head at once, coming into focus (or growing louder), and then receding. One of the functions of the material book is to misrepresent the chaos of reading: reading is definitely not one book after another. The 8 titles above are better captured under the broader title ‘August 2025’: a month-long reading environment composed of those works, smashing and overlapping and synching and contradicting. ‘August 2025’ is something like a paragraph made up of slices from each book:
My idea is to photograph a galloping horse.
‘Dogs, Greta,’ he said. ‘Life-size dogs made of silicone.’
The laird did not awake in any reasonable time; for, he being over-come with fatigue and wassail, his sleep became sounder, and his Morphean measures more intense. Apparently my description of this book as drama undercuts its potential critique of racial capitalism.
‘I don’t want to interrupt the party,’ said Michael, ‘but do you – ’
He showed his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower-show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. I went up to the picture, kissed it, and then gently walked out, and closed the door for ever!
You mention misremembering but do you ever forget completely having read a book? It's happened to me in slight ways since I began muddling through my seventies but this year I read, with great enjoyment, Sebastian Haffner's memoir Defying Hitler, made copious notes on the endpapers, and then went to shelve it in the biography section. [You'll note the pride in organisation that suggests.] I had the same copy already with notes on the end papers and read only seven months earlier! The notes on the second read were, at least, better. [ I really enjoyed The Bookmakers. That led me to your Substack blog which has been a revelation. After 60+ years of obsessive book buying and reading, I realised I'd hardly thought about books and paper in their material presence. Many thanks.]
Cheers
John Lancaster
Stephen and I used to teach Hogg and DeQuincey together on our 1820s module. Such fun!