He can read?

Last year (and the year before) I read a woefully small amount. This seems to be a common complaint among English teachers - a lot of them live in a world of words that extends beyond the 9 to 5 into soul-crushing evening marking. Reading for pleasure gets relegated to being a holiday activity, sadly, as there's so much student writing to wade through. The holidays were good, and the start of the year has been good too. I'm still well behind the amount I used to read when I was a projectionist (about 2 books a week for almost a year). I am at least reading for pleasure every day at the moment. So - books read since the end of last school year: Lord of the Flies - a very cool book, with some chilling moments. The Da Vinci Code - a well written action-film-as-novel. A very pleasant way to revisit the ideas in Holy Blood Holy Grail, which I've been casually flicking through over the past few months, without really reading. Venus on the Half Shell - a brilliant novel by Kilgore Trout. I'd been curious about what it would be like to read a whole book in that Kilgore Trout style, rather than just a plot summary. It's a lot of fun :) The Fat Man - some quality NZ fiction. A surprisingly crime-thrillery young adult book, that I very much enjoyed. Hatchet - another school text, but a good light read. Oddly enough it almost made me want to go camping in the Canadian mountains. Current Book In Progress - I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, the autobiography of Maya Angelou (or at least one book of her autobiography - I think she wrote other autobiographical books later on). It has introduced me to the words powhitetrash and whitefolksville.