So, when I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, I decided I was going to engage in book fidelity from then on. I was to read one book, finish it, and read the next. Excuses were only excuses, I said, and if I could read the entire Anne of Green Gables series from start to finish as a kid, how come I can't read like that now? What kind of a person am I?

Then I read Nick Hornby's opening chapter in The Complete Polysylabic Spree, which says that if you're finding a book boring then the book is boring. Nothing wrong with you. Something wrong with the book. Which makes me feel a whole lot better about Dostoevsky.

Since not finishing Crime and Punishment, my reading pattern has degenerated into the following shambles:

* Half way through an article in The New Yorker about Christopher Hitchens.
* One chapter into "Down and Dirty Pictures", which I started because it's the first in a series that includes "Easy Riders Raging Bulls".
* One chapter into Easy Riders Raging Bulls, which I put down so I could read Down and Dirty Pictures first.
* Half way through John Banville book (The Sea) which I was really enjoying reading but then took away with me for a weekend and never unpacked my bag.
* Half way through Saturday by Ian McEwan, which travelled with me for most of my weekend trips, tram rides to work, and I think to Sydney before I started reading it. Good book, turns out.
* Dave Eggers short stories. About four stories in.
* Love in a Time of Cholera, which I'm pretty sure everyone expects me to have read and which I have never attempted although now I am at least relocated geographically from the opening scene.
* I have read the blurb of, and been to the launch of, a book by a friend of mine, which is sitting on the bedside table (the book, not the friend, thank goodness because the book is making me guilty enough).
* Started Bleak House (previously having "studied" it, never having read it) (enjoyed it on TV so started it again). It is enormous, though, and from the same "Classics" library as the Crime and Punishment book I was reading, so yes, I am judging a book by its cover.
* A huge pile of plays by playwrights from all over the place, some of which are now confused in my head because I dip in and out so often.
* Certain pages in several editions of Granta, which are in my bathroom and which are very distracting when one is doing one's teeth.

... so Dostoevsky has a lot to answer for. He has turned me into a reading basket case again.

Things were going so well.

Oh well. Maybe I need to read something silly in order to remind me that reading is fun so that I might be able to then read something laborious and meaningful and feel better about the fact that I don't read enough.

Yay!

I'm back in Melbourne today after being more or less stolen and forced to have a week long holiday, very much contrary to my original intentions.

Stew's instructions for packing were: you'll need to wear very warm clothes but take your bathers because it will be hot.

For a control freak like me, that's about as infuriating as packing instructions get.

Anyway, so in the past week I've been to the top of Mount Wellington in Tasmania (wear warm clothes), Manly beach (take your bathers), the Sydney (Art) Biennale (take your black skivvy) and Newcastle (take a camera).

And the answer is yes, I am definitely pretentious enough to tell everyone that I went to the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Melbourne Film Festival, the Sydney Biennale and the Melbourne Writers' Festival, all in a row. I suspect there was a craft festival somewhere in Tasmania or a cheese forum in Newcastle that I can take credit for as well. I really am culturally enriched, if a little pasty around the gills.

The biennale was a bit hit and miss actually. "Zones of Contact" not really the most inspiring theme, however ambitious. Having said that, some of it was excellent. The curator's tour, though, which we had planned our whole day around, was cancelled due to the fact that "he decided it wasn't worth coming". Inspiring words.

By the way, I've cheated on Crime and Punishment. I just couldn't cope with it anymore. Instead, I read the following while on my mystery birthday holiday:

- The History Boys, by Alan Bennett, one of my favourite playwrights.

- An Article in The New Yorker about Wikipedia (it's fascinating and it's here for any fellow nerds who might be interested)

- The start of The Sea, by John Banville.

Excellent holiday. Only one verdict really. Stew's hired.

So it's that time of year again. I cannot imagine how I'm going to find time to celebrate my birthday (AUGUST ELEVENTH) what with one thing and seventeen billion others being crammed in between here and December.

First of all, the Melbourne International Film Festival opens on Wednesday and I'm going to the opening night film, and then, every day after that, to between two to five films, in a row, at a time, between Thursday and two days after my birthday (WHICH IS AUGUST ELEVENTH).

Just for practice, I went to the movies on Saturday night, where I found myself at the end of the longest queue I have ever seen at the Nova in Carlton, which I am happy to say was the queue for an Australian film. The film was Jindabyne , which I really enjoyed (I love the Paul Kelly song and I seem to remember studying the short story and not wanting to tear it to shreds, which is high praise of course, and there were some great performances in the film). There's an Aboriginal woman who, just near the end of the film, is quite, quite brilliant. Her use of pockets is lovely.

Er, also, without being at all unprofessional about it, my friend Simon is in this film and he's ace. And if I didn't already think he was ace, I would probably still think he was ace (he does this thing in this scene at the pub which I am going to have to buy the DVD for, just in order to press pause on the exact, teensy, tiny, little moment where he gets it right). Fascinatingly, his birthday is just after my birthday, or just before, I can't remember which, but in any case it somewhere around the vicinity of my birthday (AUGUST ELEVENTH), which of course is also an important reason to go and see Jindabyne.

Anyway, Crime and Punishment is still tormenting me but I am no further into it despite reading it for what feels like nine months. Hopefully I will be finished by my birthday which is on AUGUST ELEVENTH in case there was some lack of clarity surrounding that issue.

So Bleak House (Sunday nights, ABC, after the nature show omigod how cool are Sundays) has been the light house in the dark fog that is Crime and Punishment - goodness the Dickensian intrigue is almost too much to stand! The possibility that everyone is related to everybody else and that fortunes could change in the slip of a gene pool is just tantalising. Makes me think I should have read the book. Oh well. Who has time for that?

... Which is the logic behind the fact that I have also started listening to Mao's Last Dancer as an audio book while I attempt to tidy my bedroom/wake up in the mornings/establish some kind of existence for myself in the pre-coffee hours of the day. So far it's really great, although it's confusing when you watch Bleak House , read Crime and Punishment and listen to Mao's Last Dancer all in the same half a day on the weekend. By the end of it you feel like a Chinese woman with bound feet and a fortune that may or may not be yours who has just murdered someone. Yeesh.

So, August eleven, did we get that down? Birthday songs, poems, odes, and arias will be gratefully received between now and August 12th (although those on August 12th will be accepted with some degree of haughty disdain). iPods will also be accepted, as will apple crumble, frisbees, warm knitted gloves, or brightly coloured wigs.

Also, she doesn't read blogs, but get well Grandma.

I wonder if the people next door have some kind of surveillance system set up outside my house. It wouldn't be difficult, because the (empty) house next door towers over my living room (which is also my office) and there must be someone there with a camera, or at the very least a pair of binoculars, waiting for me to stop doing the "other" jobs on my list, pour myself a cup of tea, and settle down to write.

That must be what happens. Otherwise, how would they know the exact moment to turn on their noise making machine to the EXTREMELY LOUD setting and then shout over the top of it to each other in angry voices for hours on end about exactly what to do next?

Coldest morning since 2002 or something this morning. They reported in the paper that it was particularly chilly in a place called Coldstream. Well, honestly.

Up to part five of Crime and Punishment . Thought last night that in books such as this one there should be encouragements along the way ("nearly there!" and "the ending is worth it!" etc). Perhaps a graded system ("you are now 80% more likely to say something clever at a dinner party", or "congratulations, you are now 20 pages further into this book than most people").

I am going to be so smug when I finish this book.

On the days I work from home, I quite often only ever speak to one person for the entire day. Sometimes that person can be the woman calling from India to tell me about the exciting deal I've secured by being randomly selected, sometimes the person can be the girl at the gym who swipes my card and says "locker?". But most days, it's the guy in the cafe on the corner of the street who is also struggling through Crime and Punishment , and who shares my impatience about, well, the length of the damn thing and the fairly consistent conditions of the novel (ie nothing happens - protagonist worries a lot, goes on walks, is antisocial, falls asleep for hours, is Russian and poor, and altogether rather cranky).

Don't get me wrong, I know how important the whole existentialism-before-his-time stuff is, and the fact that Dostoevsky was writing during what my old literature teacher used to call "a period of great social upheaval" *, but Camus managed to write about the existential crisis of a man stuck with the consequences of a crime and he kept it punchy, Fydor.

As any Trivial Pursuit player knows, a quick game's a good game.

Having said that, I love reading a Dickens novel, no matter how long. I wonder if it's different reading Crime and Punishment in Russian. It would probably take me less time to learn Russian than it would to finish the book so perhaps I've gone about this the hard way.

But to take the blame back from one of the most celebrated novelists in the history of the world, and to reclaim the blame a little bit for myself, Coffee Guy and I agreed today that it's probably partly the fact that we're from the instant-information-generation (I could look up Crime and Punishment on Spark Notes or just google it without having to read it). But this is part of my new regime. No starting another book until I've finished this. No skipping pages. No infidelity of any kind to any book. Treat it with respect, and then when you've finished it (much like when you've ended a relationship) you can politely, with measured consideration, trash it over dinner with your close friends.

Still, those other, younger, better-looking books are really tempting me.

* By the way, my (rather amusing) literature teacher also insisted that any era, at whatever point in history, could be described as "a period of great social upheaval". He promised (he was teaching first year literature) that every lecturer we ever had in any humanities subject would begin the opening lecture of the year with the words "You must understand, we're talking about a period of great social upheaval here". For anyone still studying, pop it in an exam. Never lost a customer.

Last year on all my feedback forms for the Melbourne International Film Festival, I wrote how much I adored the experience, and I also wrote, in huge block letters across the bottom of the form YOUR BOOKING PROCESS IS IMPOSSIBLE AND YOUR PROGRAM IS INFURIATING.

Having spent the last hour (my lunch hour) online, and having spent my Monday lunch hour with two copies of the MIFF guide spread out on the office lunch table, I can honestly say that this booking procedure has become an epic journey akin to the book I'm reading, the aptly titled Crime and Punishment . Many things have happened to me during my journey - I have made friends (very nice girl on the end of the MIFF phone), I've made enemies (Stewart was in the room when I was attempting to book the other day, and I'm not sure we're on speaking terms quite yet) and I've learned many things about the struggle of mankind along the way.

The main thing I've learned? If you're booking tickets for MIFF, I advise you to physically walk into the Forum office, stand in a queue and list the films you want to see, without worrying how you're holding everyone up, and make sure you look over the shoulder of the young funky kid who types them in. I learn this every year, but that doesn't stop me hoping that one day, somewhere, someone will take note of my crooked scrawl on the feedback form: BOOKING TICKETS FOR YOUR FESTIVAL FEELS LIKE PUNISHMENT AND COULD POTENTIALLY INCITE CRIME. MUCH LIKE THE NOVEL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN MANY WAYS, ALTHOUGH WITH TRACES OF ROGER HARGRAVES' WORK (MR GRUMPY AND LITTLE MISS FURIOUS COME TO MIND).

I remain hopeful that this feedback will one day change the world. These films had better be good.

So I'm beginning to wish this Raskolnikov bloke had just hung around at home and not been able to find his axe.

Longest book in the world.