Novels (and why I don't often read them)

Dear Diary,

Besides spending far too much money on holiday on impulse, I happened to enter several second hand shops recently and pick up a few books. The ones I've mentioned so far (Plato, Christian Latin poetry and an encyclopedia) which I acquired are of great interest. Yet on my way back I picked up some novels (as well as a collection of John Donne's poetry and a book of aerial photographs of pre-historic Britain).

Blimey. I am soon running short of shelf space and I should not keep buying books with money I don't have only to cram them into the crannies in my little room, out of sight.

Yet I dislike reading a book which cost me a hundred pounds (such as my recently bought Apuleius: Rhetorical Works trans. Harrison, Hilton and Hunink - a book which has a price tag of £170) in the bath or on the way to work. It may get water damaged or become damaged in a bag as I commute. Therefore I read cheap prosaic bullshit, sorry, fiction, in the bath. At the moment I am reading Through A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. Aside from some curious anecdotes about California's counter culture in the seventies, it is a chore and a bore. So, I switched to a spy novel today: Eagle Strike by Anthony Horowitz. I thought something about MI6 might spur my attention more, but this book is absolutely ludicrous. The plot revolves around a fourteen year old boy in France on the trail of a Russian oligarch/assassin and a celebrity activist/pop-singer/businessman in Wiltshire. This is why I don't read novels. The plots are simply preposterous. There are some novels, which are not actually novels, but have to be presented as such in order to be published, by former spooks which are of interest to me, because they contain an element of realism. If I am honet, a historical work about the Service (whichever branch: MI5, MI6, any) is of far more interest to me than some flight of fancy about some fourteen year old kid or some dope fiend in the seventies. Hell, I'll be honest, reading criminal law is more compelling and interesting than this prosaic nonsense, conjured up by some so-called 'artist'.

Max.