I seem to have my reading mojo back at last, which is making me very happy indeed.

Last year I had stocked up on e-books, expecting to be reading a lot while in hospital and afterwards in recovery, but it turned out that I really didn’t have the mental capacity to read anything more substantial than Twitter for a long time. It was an attention span thing really.

When I did read books I could only really manage books I had read before, so I got through all the Milligan war memoirs and some Robert Rankins. Then I built up to reading books by authors I already knew that I liked, but they were taking a long time to get through.

And then Jayne bought me a new Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas and I started dipping into the backlog, just to enjoy the novelty of the new toy, and it has been ramping up from there – fueled by the temptations of the Kindle deals of the day. So far in 2020 I have read half a dozen novels and four non-fiction books.

Most of the fiction has been Ben Aaronovitch. Amazon had a deal where the first 5 Rivers of London books were 99p each and books 6 and 7 were a fiver each, so £15 for all 7. The non-fiction was an actual paper book about the Seinfeld television show that I treated myself to after Christmas, an advance proof of a new history of Kraftwerk and another couple of Kindle deals of the day; Flash Boys by Michael Lewis and a psychology book.

The backlog does not seem to be going down though, because recently there have been lots of temptations in the Amazon deals of the day so although I may have read 10 books so far this year, I have bought 15. This is amost the sort of reading and purchasing rate that I used to have, and it makes me wonder why I slowed down for a while. Perhaps it is no coincidence that all this has happened after I stopped being a councillor? I know that reading a decent novel or book on behavioural economics is a lot more interesting than reading endless reports, agendas and minutes!