Summer reading: the image and the reality to be

I finished Dog Days on New Year’s Eve and still got to bed before midnight.

And so I head to Angourie, on the northern New South Wales coast for three weeks, full of reading optimism, having finished my last piece of real work for last year while everyone else in the world is watching the opening overs of the Sydney (whitewash) test.

What shall I read?

My reading habits have a little of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle about them. I may end up with a Cat that is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.

Eminently qualified candidates for my reading attention are queuing up.

Among the books are two mid-year gifts from my nephew, Raphael (who lived with us): Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestineand Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century. Denise has been urging me to read James (son of John) Button’s excellent Speechless: A Year in my Father’s Business.

And, among the presents under the Christmas tree, were Chase Madar's The Passion of Bradley Manning and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise.

Neither has the photocopier been silent. The UNHCR’s reports on Nauru and Manus Island and Amnesty’s This is Breaking People, also, about Manus will find a place in the car, somewhere.

And, if all that fails (or runs out), I have an autobiographical manuscript by a friend of mine who, with others, turned around the state of youth justice in Queensland in the seventies.

Salad days, here I come.