Sunday, April 02, 2006

Germination

Starting a book related blog and sorting out the vegetable garden were supposed to keep me as sane as possible while I was slaving away in the evil clutches of a High Street banking corporation. However as one thing does not follow the other and all the best laid plans go to pot I escaped the brain mulching daily grind of being a bank clerk before I had the time to start this blog. Nonetheless I now need something to keep me distracted whilst trying to find new employment (though nothing involving till stamps or the parents of Jacquline Wilson fans).

A recent glance at my bookshelves proved to me that I own a number of books which I have not yet read (I do also own double the number of unread books in books I have read more than once) and those books keep being added to on an almost weekly (if not daily) basis. Amongst the Leaves is an attempt to prevent the piles of forgotten titles gathering more dust: I'm going to read every title on my shelves and then write a review on it. To add a bit of eccentricity to it I'm going to conduct an experiment - of sorts - by reading at least one chapter of every book to my turnips and assorted other vegetables and see how they grow. So this blog will chart my journey through the paper and vegetable foliage of my life, with the occasional rambling about things unconcerened with either books or vegetables.

At the moment I'm reading Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, which was kindly lent to me by the owner of the wonderful Harleston Bookshop in Norfolk, East Anglia, when I couldn't find anything to spend my book tokens (leaving present from the brach of High Street banking corporation, so capitalists can be nice, occasionally) on.

A note about the turnips: I am fully aware that I am not - in any way - cut out for farming as a career. However in years gone by my fantasy alternative life was to be a turnip farmer. Don't ask me why. There is no explaination for it.

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