I took a speed reading course and we read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It concerns Russia (Woody Allen)

The Guardian is awesome.

I considered just having that as my post but I guess I should expand on that simple sentence.

From time to time they run a story about tablets and education.

Being The Guardian though, it's a balanced view and not an alarmist hand wringing exercise.

I particularly liked the suggestion that reading is increasing if anything but as I delved into these statistics I realised that there's nothing much conclusive there, one way or another.

Interesting article though, if you get a chance.

A student recently showed me a suggested reading list for Scholarship English. It was an interesting list with the usual suspects (Brontes, Austen, Dickens, Vonnegut and so on) but standing out like a beacon was the name Haruki Murakami.  

Definitely, he stretches boundaries. I'm currently reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It's pretty straight forward compared to some of his other novels; these things are relative yunnerstan. And short too. Having finished the three books that make up 19Q4 recently this one is like a short story.

I do love his writing. Here's a pretty much random bit (which isn't meant to be taken literally btw):

At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.

A master class of flair!