Christmas
Christmas Day was a mess of various meats, pickles, pies, chocolate and an overly long and nearly-violent game of Pictionary. At the end we fell into an icy car and returned to Boughton and that was that. A fitful night’s sleep (populated by meat-based dreams) later and we arrive at Boxing Day. England are wiping the floor with the Australians at cricket, later there be football, we all have presents to play with and ‘Christmas Telly’ to watch. Recorded the Queen’s speech and a number of episodes of Born at Christmas, a couple of films, Doctor Who, that thing that David Walliams and Matt Lucas have done about an airport. Drivel, basically.
Revolutionary Road has now been superceded by two Christmas receipts: Stewart Lee’s How I Escaped a Fate Worse Than Death and Tom McCarthy’s C. That’s a fiction and a non-fiction, which is a good pair to be going on with. I’ve read Revolutionary Road before and the final fifty pages are the most depressing, so I’m happy to leave them to memories, until its next read.
The Stewart Lee book is an autobiography of sorts, about his return to stand-up comedy following a several-year hiatus. Included are transcripts from some of his live shows, with comprehensive footnotes explaining the genesis of his ideas. The footnotes are a bit heavy-handed in places, and I sometimes fail to understand why they’re not just included in the text, but overall the book is funny and interesting and well-written. I read some to our baby last night until Abi got fed up with my glasses poking her in the stomach.
C is a strange book, about what I know not. Currently, a baby has been born in the eighteen hundreds (I think?) to the sounds of the world’s first wireless transmission. What I do know is that Tom McCarthy has always written interesting books, even if they occasionally misfire. Remainder is about a man who receives a great deal of money as compensation for something falling on him, who then uses the money to reenact in minute detail very specific events from his life. It gets a bit much near the end, with the never-compromising level of detail, but it’s about ten times more fascinating than most novels. Tom McCarthy also wrote Tintin and the Secret of Literature, which is an analysis of the famous Herge creation and is a pretty-much perfect work of non-fiction.
I’ve also just had a bath. It was slightly too hot, and now I’m finding it hard to feel my feet. No matter.
