Tsundoku

We're now well into our second week of isolation and this morning we woke up to clear skies and a heavy frost: hence the early morning dog walk was chilly and quite brisk.

I have always enjoyed learning new words and then finding situations in which to use them, and our current period of compulsory isolation at home at last allows me to tick another one of my list.

For those of you who do not speak Japanese (like me) a tsundoku is the pile of books that you bought because you had to have them but which for one reason or another you have not yet had a chance to read. Hence over the next weeks and months my objective is to reduce the size of my tsundoku.

I'm currently reading The Science of Diskworld by Terry Pratchett and am enjoying it so much that I've just bought volumes two and three. I also still have to read Dominion, the most recent volume of Peter Ackroyd's excellent history of Britain; I bought it over a year ago and I regularly see it glaring at me from the shelf as I pass by. For light relief I've just bought Something Fresh, one of Wodehouse's Blandings Castle novels that somehow had escaped me and am re-visiting Three Men in a Boat.

I also aim to start an anthology of journalism by Anthony Burgess and a collection of film reviews by the brilliant Peter Bradshaw.

So many books, so little time...