A Dog's Eye View

NaBloPoMo Day 4: After such a long hiatus, it has been very hard to get back into blogging with any regularity (though of course, even at the best of times posting here has been quite irregular). November's NaBloPoMo challenge seemed to present a good opportunity to use an external stimulus to get back into the swing of things. Even in the midst of a more stressful job application period last year, M. and I found the time and energy to post something each day of November. Yet just four days into this year's NaBloPoMo, I'm struggling to maintain blogging momentum! And the posts have been pretty boring, even by my standards. Yesterday's post satisfies the conditions of NaBloPoMo only by the thinnest technicality, and I would normally be embarrassed to report on celebrity comings and goings in the Twitterverse.

My excuse is that I was in the midst of reading The Hippopotamus at the time, and nothing else popped to mind to remark upon. I finished reading Fry's novel last night, and I can report that it is a satisfactorily entertaining, if thinly plotted, little story, stitched together from the sort of silly, supercilious banter which the BBC has trained us to expect from the waning British aristocracy. Perhaps most enjoyable was the vocabulary — I learned a new word every chapter. (Apologies to Mr. Barfield, my high school Latin teacher, but "balneal" required a visit to Mr. Webster. But then again, I seldom bathe.) And if the author's wit and diction are as fluent in person as on the page, he must be iridescent as a cocktail party guest. Still, the book is only worth reading if you're in the right kind of mood, say you've just watched a Wodehouse adaptation and want more of the same, only a bit more modern. I wouldn't rush out to buy the next Fry novel, but I'd pick it up on remainder and keep it on the shelf for when fancy strikes.

For no good reason, other than my affection for dogs, be they full-furred or fictional, I'll end with a quote:

Soda jumped and barked with pleasure. Never occurred to her to wonder what the fuck we were doing playing games like this late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Still, I suppose if you're a dog and are used to watching humans zooming around at high speed in metal boxes, staring at large sheets of paper at breakfast-time and breathing in smoke from short white tubes, then nothing the species does has the power to surprise you.

Not even supporting the Tea Party?