Culture

In a blaze of self-awareness, and possibly in part due to the fact that I’m still up at half past 5 in the morning and listening to Radio 3, I have decided that I’m not sufficiently cultural. It’s not as if I’m not heading in that direction, I go to the theatre, I read books, and I usually purchase a newspaper at least twice a week. This, I feel, is a good start.

It’s something I can build on though. I can read more (and certainly, to be fair, better) books. (Whilst ostensibly I’m currently reading Haruki Murakami’s ‘Dance Dance Dance‘, I spent most of the evening reading ‘The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl‘, which is not to say that this is not a book that I’m enjoying, but possibly one which I would be less willing to carry around with me in public). An awful lot of my time seems to be spent sitting around wondering what I should be doing next, and this could easily be filled with reading. It’s not even as if I have the excuse of a lack of access to the kind of books I want to read. My bookshelves are half-filled with unread copies of old classics and scientific literature, tending to be regularly restocked every birthday and Christmas at a rate which, I am saddened to admit, slightly exceeds my reading rate for the year.

The addition of a Kindle to my list of technological gadgets was originally supposed to help with this problem, and I suppose that it has a little. I read Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage‘ on it, which is something that I probably never would have otherwise bought, and enjoyed rather a lot, but it seems to rather facilitate my need to read trash as well (see above). To fix this, I’ve promised myself that, starting from my birthday (I think in about 3 weeks) I’m going to read at least one  book per week for the next year. I’ve no idea how this’ll pan out, but hopefully it’ll point me back onto a more literary bent, and I’ll finally get around to reading Don Quixote, which sounds like so much fun but I’ve been avoiding for ages.

I realise that my feelings on what makes one a cultural person are probably substantially different from many other people’s. Some people would say that the fact that I ever pick up a book makes me a cultural pinnacle, while others would say that my lack of knowledge of Dostoevsky and the fact that I can’t really stomach poetry means that I’m insufferably uncouth and should really stop trying. I suppose I feel that what makes me feel as if I’m succeeding matters most (any position that lets you look down your nose at both ends of the spectrum can’t be sniffed at.)

(I did supplement my cultural feeling last week by going to see the NT Live production of Frankenstein at the cinema. I can safely say that it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Even through the screen the staging, effects and acting were all astounding, and I’m incredibly jealous of anyone who actually managed to get tickets to see the thing live. It must have been the spectacle of a lifetime.)

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