Reading vacation

Spent a glorious evening reading tonight. Now that I have moved within walking distance of work, I no longer commute 1.5 hours a day by Tube. Though I don't miss scrambling for seats or suffocating in a hermetically-sealed chamber each day, I do miss the (usually) uninterrupted 45 minutes of getting lost in a novel. Commuting, I got through a book a week. Now, I struggle to read a book a month. The simple solution is to cut down on going out. The less painful solution is to book some vacation time - say 2 weeks - not to travel anywhere but to lie in bed - or sit in a cafe with a comfy sofa - all day and read.

A work colleague of mine often takes 1 or 2 weeks holiday to do nothing but hang out on her boat (she lives on the river) and organic allotment. She has no desire to always be going somewhere (she does enough travelling for work).

According to the Observer, one book roughly every 20 seconds is published in the US alone. I am glad that I long ago gave up any ambition of ploughing my way through the [insert the latest "1000 books you must read before you die" list] but I still have a stack of books waiting for me. The pile never diminishes - I read too slowly these days for that to happen - but still I keep optimistically buying new books to read.

I'm now fantasising about a reading vacation.

Books waiting for me to read them:

• Rohinton Mistry "Family Matters"
• John Banville "Shroud"
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (still haven't read this)
• Martin Amis "London Fields" (ditto)
• Monica Ali "Brick Lane"
• Hari Kunzru "The Impressionist"
• Alexander McCall Smith "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency"
• Hanif Kureishi "The Buddha of Suburbia" (great BBC drama, great soundtrack, need to read the book)
• Paul Auster "The New York Trilogy" *
• Haruki Murakami "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" *
• Luke Rhinehart "The Dice Man" *
• Christina Schwarz "Drowning Ruth"

* Damn those 3 for 2 offers at Waterstones!

Book blogs:
+ Bookslut
+ Amazon world: Some of Amazon's more interesting book reviews
+ Literary saloon