Roll on 2016

I’m at my dad’s place for a couple of days over Christ­mas, I’m not feel­ing at all fest­ive this year though, and it seems a lot of other people aren’t either. When I was grow­ing up, they nearly always showed Water­ship Down on TV at some point over Christ­mas. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now it seems an odd and slightly depress­ing choice of film to repeat every year. So here’s the trail­er as my half-hearted attempt at being fest­ive.

I haven’t really had as much time off lately as I thought I would, and unfor­tu­nately it hasn’t been the fun kind of busy, more the enorm­ous list of things you need to plough through busy. Belea­guered is possibly the word I’d use to describe how I’ve felt the last few weeks. It seems I’m not alone, and with the combin­a­tion of my own life and the gener­al political/​news events of the year, 2015 can do one. I’m hoping to have a quiet and relax­ing new year, and a better start to 2016.

(I have enjoyed a bit of schaden­freude lately with the Martin Shkreli case though, seeing the venal little weasel get arres­ted. I guess I find it inter­est­ing as well because normally when people get arres­ted for that kind of fraud and greed, it’s some super-Repub­lic­an/T­ory combover golf­ing guy, the sort of person I don’t really have any contact with, and they stick to the No Comment school of PR. He on the other hand, is a recog­nis­able type of guy around my age, that minus the bad plastic surgery and large amounts of money you feel you could already know and despise as someone’s irrit­at­ing manchild house­mate or embar­rass­ing broth­er who’s always creep­ing on your female friends and attempt­ing to be edgy on the inter­net, and who would with the addi­tion of the money and notori­ety go in to exactly the same sort of embar­rass­ing bratty PR melt­down in an attempt to milk the 15 minutes of fame. I wonder how trashy the film edition will be in a couple of years time).

Over Christ­mas while visit­ing relat­ives, I’ll round up brief reviews of books I’ve read this year. I normally read around 50-60 books a year, and set the target counter on Goodreads (you can see my list here). For some reas­on I blithely set the target as 104, think­ing oh, two books a week is easy. It would be easy I guess if I didn’t have such a taste for massive door­step books and also work full time, (and also used to have a commute with too many changes to read prop­erly). I kept making myself need­lessly anxious that I was behind the fairly ridicu­lous target I’d set myself, so I turned it off. I’ve read 71 books this year anyway, and there’s still a week left of the year, when I’m off and have few other distrac­tions. Rather than deal with the books in the order I read them, I’ve organ­ised them into categor­ies based on topic, and I’ll post the reviews in batches.