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!