Over the weekend I finished reading a wonderful book: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Please, please read it. It's astonishingly good.

A passage that I've been turning over in my mind the last couple of days:

This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

I am reminded of this precious instruction by my own great failure to live up to it recently. Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little.

I am tired. In the absence of anything interesting to say, I'll just link to this, which I was rather surprised to find in my favourites just now (I don't remember having come across it before) - hot library smut.

It's been ages. Sorry. Fixing all the links/pictures just seemed like too enormous/tedious a task, so I let the whole thing slide I'm afraid. And life was a bit mental for most of last year, particularly the second half. But I'm going to go back and fix, painstakingly, all the broken stuff in this old thing and see if I can't start writing here again, because I enjoyed it for the six months I was doing it.

So, to kick off again, a book and a picture. The book is William Fiennes's The Snow Geese, which I started reading back in November I think, and have been struggling a little with. It's a travel book really, I suppose, with the author following snow geese as they migrate, with the spring, from the USA up to the Canadian arctic and their breeding grounds. The mechanics of bird emigration are fascinating. Really, the book's about homecoming, I suppose, and I like it, but I do find his prose a little mannered, a little self-consciously poetic, for my taste. He's been compared to Annie Dillard, but I don't think he has her simplicity. Still, it's a beautiful book, and good to read in the cold weather we're currently (finally) having.

And a picture to celebrate Wednesday's snow, which (predictably) messed up travel in the capital, but was a treat to wake up to.

Not too sure about the new platform. I'd only just got the hang of the old format... I'll have to have a fiddle around and find a layout I like, and go back and upload all the pictures.

Meanwhile, some photography. I came across a project called 100 x 100, by Michael Wolf, today: 'photographs of residents in their flats in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate: 100 rooms, each 100 square feet in size.' They're all amazing pictures.

Wow, I've been slack recently. In all sorts of ways; not least on here...

I finally started reading A Tale of Two Cities the weekend before this one just gone, on the way to Paris (thank you Rosie and Andy respectively). What an incredible book. I'm definitely a Dickens convert. Verbose he may be but he certainly knew how to plot, and how to tackle some rather huge themes. Are all of his books about redemption, or is that just me? Nice to look back and see that The Frozen Deep led me to such interesting books; next up, No Name.

Finally got over my allergy and read The Da Vinci Code, in a day, in bed, last week. That was Andy's fault too. Not as badly written as I was expecting, but a thriller that doesn't really deliver isn't much of a thriller, is it? What annoyed me most about it is how wet/postmodern it ended up being; the bit where someone or other says that it doesn't really matter what you believe - either version of the story is true - just rendered the whole book/conspiracy rather pointless/toothless. If it doesn't matter or not whether Jesus married and had kids, the secret's hardly explosive.

Anyway, now at least I feel slightly less cloistered, and I'm on to Russell Hoban's frankly extraordinary Riddley Walker, which Dad's been going on at me to read since I was a teenager. Hooked from the first page, with the post-apocalyptic setting, the mythic account of the little shining man being split apart, Riddley's language, the Eusa/Punch show... extraordinary is really the only word. And the cover of the edition I have (from Estelle, who's sadly leaving us soon) is brilliant. Read it, please.