I have been trying, with varying success, not to start new books without first finishing some of the ones I am already reading, which at the moment are only three:

Never greater slaughter, by  Michael Livingston. It is about the battle of Brunaburgh and Anglo-Saxon England (sorry, I am not going to give up a perfectly reasonable definition just because a bunch of American suprematists use it for their own purposes). It’s a great read.

Hana Videen’s The Deor Hord, about animals in Old English manuscripts. Fun, although not so involving.

Alternate endings: a short story anthology of historical what if. I have only read two, for now: Vercingetorix’s virgin, by Virginia Crow. Vercingetorix and Caesar survive the Ides of March. In A race against time, by Kathie Dunn, Robert of Gloucester manages to have baby Henry II crowned in time to thwart Stephen’s plans. The next is about King John surviving his illness in 1215, but who knows when I will read that.

I may add Ted Hughes’s The Birthday letters, even though this month I have only read one poem, Perfect light.

Everything else, including The kites and Blood Meridian, is officially on ice or dropped.

This morning – my day off – the postman called to leave a parcel: a new book, but for all my propositions this won’t go on the pile of “next to be read”: I want to find the time for it, because this is reality, this is now: Night train to Odesa, by Jen Stout is a reportage on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian struggle for survival.

To honour the journalist’s work, and the Ukrainian’s courage and endurance, I will find the time. Brunaburgh, too, was a heroic struggle of one people to survive, but that was a thousand years ago. This is now. Slava Ukraini.

Ps: I have listened to the audiobook Nicholas Nickleby, and have moved on to Tristram Shandy, read by Anton Lesser, too. It’s jyst as mad as I remembered it.

I’ve got to go, revision later.

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