Books I've actually finished lately: 130

Books I've actually finished lately:113

The description [in Minima Moralia] of a short-order cook in a place like Teddy’s Cafe, as ‘a juggler with fried-eggs’ is Nabokovian, though in addition to seeing the cook as a juggler Nabokov would probably have put a spin on the eggs too. I thought of this as I made a note in my notebook...

- Geoff Dyer

Against my ruins

Two extracts from the Lonely Planet's Sri Lanka: a travel survival kit (3rd ed. 1987; security updates c.1990):

If you like ruins you'll find your fill in the ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

- 'Introduction' [first full page of text]

There are no places of interest unless you are interested in photographing ruins.

- STOP PRESS [last full page of text]

Allow myself to introduce...

An introduction is a temptation: it can turn so easily into a self-justifying exercise...

- Shiva Naipaul, North of South ('Introduction')

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 99 / This Week's Literary Hero

His is one of those cases which are more numerous than those suppose who have never lived anywhere buy in their own homes, and never walked but in one line from their cradles to their graves. We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low-places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship or vice.

- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Books I've actually finished lately: 81

Books I've actually finished lately: 79

Books I've actually finished lately: 73

On India (as it happens)

I returned from this journey embarrassed by my own ignorance, at how ill read I was.

- Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

Books I've actually finished (again) lately: 59

I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it.

- Ludo, aged 11

Win a Writer's Retreat in Iceland!

Or, more accurately - Win a Writer's Retreat (oh, but it's in Iceland).

InDefinition - 73

selfie-explanatory, adj. what it'll be like listening to people go through their holiday snaps ten years from now

Books I've actually finished lately: 58

Books I've actually finished lately: 55

With thanks to Tpr Newman, who gave me the paperback in Afghanistan in an attempt to reduce the weight of his home-bound luggage.

(I read it in Sri Lanka.)

Books I've actually finished lately: 34

Books I've actually finished lately: 22

Cross-cut

There's a scene in the very excellent The Trip to Italy where the now-familiar Coogan-Brydon banterthon ends with "... That's the crux."

The next frame is a close-up of headstones in the foreigners' cemetery in Rome.

I'd really like to believe that this was intentional.

Ouch!

An insatiable nomad, he lives in Notting Hill like everybody else.

- Private Eye, semi-legitimately, on Bruce Chatwin