The book I have most reread

Years ago, before children and Sydney and Responsibility, I enrolled in a PhD. It was my dream, to be a tenured whatsit in a university, left largely alone in my first floor office writing pointless stuff (let's be honest) about books I loved.

I worked on my thesis for years. I wrote drafts, I researched, I even went overseas to do things in archives, but in writing every chapter I came to the same point: "Blah blah blah... [nothing]".

There's nothing worse than nothing.

So the book I have read the most, ever, was the subject of chapter four: The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt. It is brilliant and awkward and short and boring but every time (of the fifteen? Twenty times?) I have read it I have found something new, had that experience of the sublime; a sentence here, a paragraph there, that is not in any way special but says something to me.

And I know that I am but one humble reader, but in that moment of reading the sentence is there just for me.

[With a good sleep I promise I'll be less melodramatic. Forgive me.]

All good things really do come to an end

I read an article ages ago about a man who had read all of Jane Austen's novels except one. He considered himself to be one of Jane Austen's greatest fans yet despite this (or because of this) he wasn't prepared to read the last novel (Pride and Prejudice, as it happened).

At the time I thought the guy was a bit of a loon; why deny yourself the pleasure of reading every word published by your favourite author? What can't be gained by drinking deep of the Pierian Spring, etc?

It appears a great deal can be gained by not drinking deep, at least not at a second helping.

As a recent sufferer of nostalgia I've been revisiting some books and movies from yesteryear and found them to be, sadly, not what I remember them to be.

First I re-read what I thought was one of my favourite books, Possession by A. S. Byatt. While I loved the fictional poet (see my obsession with lovely poet-boys as per yesterday), I struggled with the heroine, the postmodern hurdy-gurdy, the late '80s fashions.

Then I watched what I thought was one of my favourite films, or trilogy of films, Three Colours: Blue, White and Red. It turns out they're a bit boring (except Blue, which still moderately bewitches me thanks to Juliet Binoche).

And don't even start me on music. An evening's home-DJing on New Year's Eve left me with no illusions as to the music I used to love.

So where to from here? Books will only be read once, films seen once, music listened to until I don't wake up each day dying to hear it again. At that point I'll put it all in a box and take it up to Newtown to sell at the Saturday markets.

So that Ian McEwan, nice hard-cover, hey; in fine condition too. For you? $3. What do you say?

Islands in the stream

Every now and then you come across pairings that just work, like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, Marieke Hardy and Bob Ellis, and Nick Cave and me. There's something so right about these couplings that it's hard to imagine a world without them (especially after you've worked so hard to conjure them up).

So it is with some of the Western world's greatest love stories: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult, and Queen Elizabeth and her corgis.

But if we split the pairs and consider each individual separately, what do we have? A metrosexual man-boy, a whiny tween, a lad who doesn't know when to let go, a chick whose propensity to drink leads her to all sorts of trouble, and Queen Elizabeth and her corgis (I can't make it any worse than it already is).

So considered together the partners work, but if we separate the blissful pairings it's like waking up the morning after.

But what of the stories where you fall in love with one half of the pair (say, hypothetically, the dashing, serious-browed poet-scholar Randolph Henry Ash in A.S. Byatt's Possession) yet find the large-toothed, sharp-nosed heroine (say the poetess Christabel Lamotte in the very same Possession) hard to take?

What if you think, hypothetically, that you'd be a better match for Randolph Henry Ash than Christabel Lamotte?

Is it wrong to object to a fictional pairing? Is it insensitive to prefer one spunky fictional love-nut over the other not so spunky nutter?

And logistically speaking, how would one actually intervene in a pairing between an obviously ill-suited fictional nineteenth century couple who exist in an archive romance that was published in 1990?

Important questions, I know. So tell me, which fictional character would you bump to get closer to their squeeze?