But a couple of years ago, it occured to me that in the finite number of years I have left to live, there’s no way I could read a good cross-section of the world’s greatest lit, nor get a basic understanding of the major areas of human inquiry, without some concerted effort. In other words, if all I read are the “Da Vinci Code”s and the “Eat Pray Love”s that friends put into my hands, I’m wasting what little time I devote to reading.

So I decided instead to make an ordered list of consciously-chosen readings aimed at getting a Basic Understanding of Everything. I scoured the basic reading lists for liberal arts and first-year science students at major universities everywhere, looking for the common titles. I used the various lists of Great Works published here and there, selecting to ensure a variety of cultural sources (because a lot of those lists are western-skewed).

Each of the major arts and sciences received its own list ordered in a tree-structure, from the general to be read first (The Penguin History of the World, Guns, Germs and Steel) in order to understand the more specific books at the ends of branches (The Peloponnesian War).

For literature, there was to be no order, just a selection of stories to ensure all time periods and cultural sources were represented.

It took me about a month, but the exercise itself was very instructive. I had to inform myself on things like whether to include Kafka just because I’d heard the name before. And should I read the Koran, the Mabinogion, the Icelandic Edda, the Ramayana? What are they really and where did they come from? Who are the most important modern novelists in the Arab world? And ancient China? Which of Dostoievski’s to include? And who the f*ck is Kafka again?

Once the list was complete, I calculated the volume of the entire undertaking as well as my expected reading speed, and concluded that it would take me 17.58 years, well within my life expectancy. An encouraging thought. Satisfied that I’d never wonder again what to read, I put the list aside and didn’t touch it for two years.

It’s one thing to intend to read the classics, it’s quite another to actually get through Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Plus, the value of a lot of the classics I’ve had to read in school was lost on me (yeah Hemingway and Steinbeck, I’m looking at you). So although the thought of muscling through “important” but challenging reading is attractive, the short-term motivation always seems to elude me. Something always seems more pressing, like the 4th identical broadcast of the same news on TV.

But during this trip to Israel I finally started. I re-found Project Gutenberg, a free repository of copyright-free books for download, much more useful in this age of e-readers than at its inception. The selection available reminded me a lot of my old Bucket List Reading List so I loaded my Kindle with free classics, and lo! Turns out they’re classics for a reason. Who knew.

It had been a while since I’d been irresistibly pulled through a book (“just one more page then I’ve really got to sleep”) as I was by The Great Gatsby, my first. I closed that one at 1 am and thought, breathlessly, “Oh my GOD! Let’s try another one!” An idiotic commonplace for most people, a rediscovered novelty for me. Voltaire followed (bellyachingly funny – who’d have thought?!), then Wilde, Ibsen, Orwell…

Of course this epiphany will probably end once I get back home and The Voice is on, or the dog needs to pee (or when I actually try something challenging), but discovering just how great the Great Works are, has been an unexpected pleasure for a not-so-avid-reader like me.

I have trouble leaving out details, going the expressionistic/naive/stylised route. So this summer I decided to start off by copying those who could. This is gouache and pen (ruined the shit out of the pen).

Pen and watercolor.

Les raisons de mon silence ont déjà été développées ici, et d’ailleurs, elles sont sensiblement les mêmes que celles décrites plus éloquemment par d’autres.

Reste que ma démangeaison d’expression s’est sublimée autrement dans la dernière année. Alors, pourquoi pas tenter de dépoussiérer cet espace quelque peu, en y postant mes dessins et autres recherches créatives?

Pikoti’s five-year-old son came to stay with us for a few days last week; what a strange and new experience. Although I was a little nervous about being a sorta-step-girlfriend-or-whatever for a while, it went very well. The big surprise wasn’t that having a kid around takes up every minute of your attention and every joule of energy; I was rather well-prepared for that. Rather, I was stunned by how much more time needs to be budgeted to get anything done with a kid. And after just a day or so, I found myself becoming one of those people who talk about the kid all the time.

After this momentous meeting, we went to Paris to stay with Pikoti’s parents, both of them shrinks. With regular business visits to HQ, Paris has somewhat become for me synonymous with a conference room in Montreuil (the Longueuil of Paris). I hadn’t really had time to build up too many expectations about this Easter weekend stay.

But Paris being what it is, I didn’t have to look for anything to be blown away. It was a gorgeous sunny 25C, we enjoyed incredible food and drink (ahhh, Conté), and I spent a fortune as Pikoti took me on a veritable tour of all the best shops. One nighttime dinner and walk in Montmartre particularly moved me; the place looked very much to me like Québec City, and after almost a year in northern England it was touching to be (sort of) in the homeland.

We’re now concluding two days in sunny London before returning to Newcastle tonight.

As for work, Driver San Francisco has come under media attention again, with positive cover stories in Joy-Pad and GamesMaster this week. Watch this space for links to those and other stories.