Nathan Hobby’s blog

First this blog degenerated into Nathan’s reading journal, and then no posts at all. I’m sorry. It’s all been happening at my other blog, because a lot of my thinking and attention has been tied up with faith and theology.

I started rereading Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, because it was once a favourite book, but I didn’t finish it and I can’t explain why. Then I didn’t finish Richard Ford’s Men and Women either, and I can’t explain that either.

I read two chapters of G.K. Chesterton’s St Francis of Assissi, but I didn’t like that at all. It’s something his tone - I get this in a number of books written in the first half of the twentieth century - that is so condescending, as if the reader wants to be lectured. He spends those chapters explaining what sort of biography he mustn’t write. It was written for the ‘layperson’ and I got the impression he wanted to give the layperson a good piece of his mind. I just wanted to know about St Francis, thanks. (And I don’t even like your detective stories.)

And now I picked up the Arabian Nights in this old companion volume that is just beautiful. If you flip it around, it’s got Aesop’s Fables on the other side. And the binding page is this sixties wallpaper style. The Arabian Nights are enchanting me. What sheer and beautiful craziness! A doctor lets his head get cut off and then talks back to the king after his head’s cut off to get his revenge. There’s fish which start talking when they get cooked and there’s all these interwoven repeating variations on themes, like the delay of death due to the telling of a story.

And Sinbad borrows from the Odyssey to tell the story of his escape from a Cyclops. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind that.

For a couple of years I blogged voraciously at nathanhobby.modblog.com. Then modblog went down about a year ago and it all disappeared. I don’t want to be dramatic, but I guess that gave me a bit of a taste of what will happen when I die. All those memories and words and pictures go with me. (At least as far as I’m concerned.)

 I blogged about everything in the one place - theology, quotes, reading, my writing, my personal life. I think the end result of that is that I really limited my readers. So now I’ve got heaps of blogs with quite specific focuses. So that people who want to read the quotes I’ve collected don’t have to read about a great recipe I found or that I thought The Others was a waste of time the other night.

 I don’t know if this new approach will work or not. I’m not going to have the time to blog like I once did; it stopped me working on my novel.

At the moment, I’m sort of between novels, so maybe I’ll have time to blog.