Reading

Having been released from reading almost solely for the Varsity course I was doing, I now seem to be soaking up books left, right and centre on all manner of topics - though strangely enough, few of them are fiction. At the moment I just can't seem to find the right novel to read, and though I've started a couple they haven't enthused me in the slightest. This is nothing against fiction; it's just my state of mind at the moment, I guess.

A friend of mine - the collaborator on the play we're doing, as it happens - was enthusing last night about a trilogy called The Salterton Trilogy. These three books were written by William Robertson Davies (he tended to drop the William when writing), a man who is credited with being one of Canada's most distinguished men of letters (a title he hated, apparently).

The three books in the trilogy are Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). They apparently have a background of amateur theatricals, (as you might gauge from this cover) which could certainly make them interesting to me.

They have very little to do with shower faucets, which is hardly surprising - though not having read the books yet, I could be wrong on this. And why did I mention that? Just to see if you were on your toes. Your comments will enlighten me as to whether this was the case or not. I'd hate to think you were skimming through this blog post just picking out the interesting bits and ignoring the rest. Though one of the books I got from the library recently - and it was an interloan too, meaning it cost me real money - was so thin in content (heaps of quotes from famous people but not much else) that I skimmed a good three-quarters of it before I came to anything that really aroused my interest. Terrible state of affairs, but such is the nature of books. And anyway, if I'm going to read at all I need to keep reading as fast as I can...being as old as I am, I may not have much reading time left....!