Is it over?

I’ve been a very bad member of the Bad Girls Book Club. I barely made it three chapters into our May book, Fourteen Days. I’m not entirely sure I got past the first page of last month’s book, Tracking Giants.

It’s not as if, having started one of the book club books, I decided it just didn’t grab me and read something else. I simply have not been reading. Full stop. I’ve always read in bed before I go to sleep. In bed by eleven or midnight, read for a couple of hours (or more), lights out. Always.

But for months now I haven’t. Around the time I would usually go to bed and start reading, I’ve instead decided to watch four more episodes of Father Brown. Okay, I have also streamed better things than that. Some actually quite good shows. A lot of them. Until three in the morning. No book at bedtime.

Take last Saturday. I decided for some reason to rewatch The Phantom Menace, the first of the three films in the second (which was actually the first) Star Wars trilogy. I didn’t go to the cinema to see it when it was released, but I did rent it on DVD when that was available. Watched it with a friend and afterwards we agreed we were underwhelmed. Between Liam Neeson (spoiler) getting killed and feeling at the time that Jaja Binks was a shocking racial stereotype, I decided to give the others in that trilogy a miss. After rewatching it I was still narked about Neeson snuffing it, but Jaja, whilst definitely annoying, didn’t seem so bad. What I had forgotten in the intervening years was quite how awful the kid playing young Skywalker was. Couldn’t Lucas have used a British kid? Or at least tried to find an American kid who could act? Finished it around 11pm. Did not go to bed. Watched Attack of the Clones instead. (Oh, my god, the actor playing grown up Anikin is almost as bad as the kid.) Finished that. Did not go to bed. Watched Revenge of the Sith instead. Went to bed around 3:30am. Jeez. A week later I remember virtually nothing about any of the three films other than all the American actors being outacted by all the Brits, including Anthony Daniels (C-3PO).

I could have been reading. The next Bad Girls meeting was coming up fast. (It was last night.) I had dipped in and out of Every Time I Go on Vacation Someone Dies. In the three weeks since it had been picked, I’d read (over breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner, but never in bed) maybe a third of it. The novel has been described as a “perfect beach read” and that just about sums it up. It’s not challenging. I’m the one who’s been challenged.

Thursday night I actually got myself into bed at a reasonable time and read for a couple of hours, after which I had until 7pm yesterday to get to the end. And I decided I was bloody well going to do it.

Yesterday, for the first time this summer, I took myself down to the garden swing.

And stayed there (other than a couple of breaks to pee or make tea) for four hours.

I did it! I finished a book! Hurrah! Has the curse (or whatever it is) been broken? God, I hope so. There’s a big pile of books beside my bed that isn’t going to read itself.

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STOP PRESS: Just checked the Bad Girls Google docs spreadsheet and it turns out I forgot about a book. Fourteen Days was our April, not May book. There was something else between that and Tracking Giants last month: Fortune Favors the Dead, which I did actually manage to finish. (And enjoyed.) So the reading drought hasn’t been going on for quite as long as I thought. That’s something, I suppose.