In Woolwich today I popped into a charity shop and picked up a book on Mesoamerica for a few quid. I’m not sure why, but my bibliophilic tendencies have returned recently. It could be connected with having to return to work on my thesis, but I have been thinking about books and wanting to read. Yet it has effected me in the oddest of ways: the other day, I decided to look up the biggest book I could find on one subject. This turned out to be Martin Gilbert’s biography of Winston

Churchill, with 8 main volumes (each about 800 pages) and 16 companion volumes, each containing thousands of pages of source material. Now, I have no intention of buying this gigantic book – at the rate I read, I’d be dead before I finish it – but it impressed me anyway.

Churchill aside, this morning I ordered a couple of (somewhat shorter) texts I need to work on for my thesis off the net. Not having a decent library or book store around rather sucks, but it was about time that I, as a cinephile, bought my own copy of Keathley’s The wind In The Trees anyway. They should come in a few days, so to keep my thirst for the written word satisfied, I bought an interesting-looking tome on the Americas before Columbus. When I got home, I settled down to read. It’s written in a chatty style common in populist American history books, and partly reads like a travelogue, but I was instantly fascinated. Far from being just a realm of hunter-gatherer, the Americas before Columbus may have been far more populated and complex than previously thought. I spent a good couple of hours just reading.

I think I need to re-engage with art and literature; to start reading again, thinking again. I’m not sure why I feel like this – it’s not as if I stopped thinking, and perhaps I’m being too pretentiously self-critical – but I have missed the feel of a book in my hands.