Try as you might, you just can't ignore it

Valentine's Day was observed at Pod Klonami in the low-key style to which we've long since become accustomed: monshu heated up leftovers and laid out some chocolate-covered strawberries whilst I tossed the faded Spring Festival narcissus into the compost and snuck a copy of Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship next to his plate. (He read a review of Tóibín The empty family in the Economist recently which piqued his interest.) And then he went to bed while I listened to Robyn on YouTube.

Given my lack of distraction, I considered calling some of my unwillingly single gay friends to cheer them up. But partly I was too lazy and partly I didn't want to risk coming off as in any way patronising. For a moment, I thought about belatedly showing up at Burger Night to socialise, but the gravitational pull of the hearth got the better of me.

Getting my Irish out

It was a pleasant dally in the East while it lasted, but I think Irish season is arriving early this year. You can probably credit the weather--how can you not think of the British Isles when it's overcast, chilly (but not freezing!), blustery, and damp? Of course, unlike my other pashes, this is one I always know is coming around again, so I've stockpiled plenty of literature for it. O'Brien, Kiely, Bowen, O'Connor, O'Connor, O'Brien--the only question is where do I start!

Fortunately, I fit in a lot during this last surge. It's not a New Year's resolution per se, but I'd like to do a lot more reading than I have been, and so to that end I planned on posting monthly summaries to motivate myself. But then January was something of a bust and I became disheartened. So I started stacking the deck by attacking books I was mostly finished with and I'm on track to end February with a respectable total.

I was going to try to keep the Turkish thing up a just a bit longer, but it's so hard to find anything by an author other than Pamuk. Which is why I thought I'd scored a real coup with that Kurban Said novel, only to find out that it was translated from German. Pah! It's not like the German version would be easy to find, so maybe I could've sucked it up, but the stiffness of the translation is just too offputting. I gave it another try tonight but my disgust got the better of me when I hit a passage with mistranscribed Persian.