A tweet from @blackbirdbks reminded me that the summer I was 18 I read these two, thinking I ought, because everyone else starting English at Trinity was sure to have done so. They hadn’t, and much of both went over my head, but it was a summer I remember fondly. (Apropos of nothing, it was also the summer I chamber-maided at the Shelbourne.)

Reading fat books in the summer seems to be a habit that has stuck. In the early days it was the novels from the curriculum I hadn’t managed to finish: Don Quixoto, Tom Jones, Vanity Fair. Later, it was A Suitable Boy. Another year it was The Corrections; another, a stab at Proust (no, I didn’t manage all seven volumes). One year it was Foucault’s Pendulum; last year it was The Goldfinch. This year A Little Life filled the slot.

Almost without exception I wonder/ed why great swathes weren’t cut by author or editor. . .