Bit cryptic, that, but I can’t express it better. I just wanted to write it down to remind myself how beautiful, how truly mind-bogglingly wonderful it feels when you’re around someone whose mere presence spurs you on to new heights.

It’s almost like you inhabit a thought-bubble. Like you are both the only people in the world who matter, the only people in the world you will ever want to talk to (clearly I can’t speak for the other person here, I’m just blathering on about myself), and who knows, perhaps the only two people who will possess such a perfect, intuitive understanding. It is that effortlessness, that easy slipping into warmth and camaraderie, that is so attractive.

I suppose I have to remind myself that this wasn’t always there. That it takes work, comfort, presence, the lowering of barriers and the finding of feet on shaky new ground.

(But if anybody’s ever going to stand a chance against the built-up persona and the perfection, I’ll have to hammer the thought into my head.)

I stayed up till half past five in the morning, breathlessly racing through the admirable The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. The first thing I did when I woke up? Ordered books 2 and 3 in the series.

I similarly stayed up till the wee hours of the morning in a strange state that was a mix of wonder, hazy confusion and anxiety, as I followed the adventures of Paul Atreides in Dune.

I watched a terrible stream of the Copa del Rey game between Barcelona and Real Madrid, both terrified and amazed by the incredible football on display. I almost dared to think they could win right there in the Camp Nou – the closest I’ve come to harbouring such a hope in a year and a half of following them!

I was utterly and completely won over a second time by the wonderful Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a sociopath look so sexy in a black greatcoat. Every time he launched into one of his monologues explaining the obvious solution to an amazed audience, I turned into a dreamy-eyed fangirl. Cannot wait for Season 3.

I reinforced my 2012 resolutions with Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord, which has to be one of the most heart-warmingly naive, unselfconsciously charming books I’ve read in a long, long time. Happiness is a way of seeing things, indeed.

Oh, and lest I forget, work and sociability are progressing very nicely indeed :)

I’m absolutely loving January.

This job does that to you sometimes, especially on days when you’re reduced to stalking authors in order to get in touch with them or changing all the lower-case instances of the letter ‘k’ in a document to upper-case (and you can’t cheat and use MS Word’s special tools for venal tasks like these because you might miss one, or accidentally change a k to a K when it ought to be a k). Or of course, today’s task: making ever smaller zipped folders of the figures from a textbook and uploading them to the web catalogue one at a time because the damn thing doesn’t like it if you try to upload 75MB worth of figures at once. It’s temperamental like that.

But better silly than disgruntled, eh?

As the first month of 2012 comes to a close, I’ve come to the following conclusions:

- There are some mind-bogglingly stupid people in the world. Whether it’s shouting about how homosexuality ISN’T A CHOICE, DAMN YOU, or worrying about how liberal philosophies and critical thinking are un-American, or even labouring under the misapprehension that all Indian women see their sexuality as part of the cult of Shakti (I kid you not), or lying to Salman Rushdie about all the big bad assassins out to kill him at the Jaipur LitFest, it all comes down to the same thing: sometimes, people just don’t want to see themselves as repositories of rationality, critical judgement and empathy. Ah well. Good luck to them.

- I’m even more hopelessly contradictory than I always thought I was. Show me a disinterested man, and I’ll pursue him to the ends of the earth. Show me an interested one, and I’ll find a million things wrong with him. I’ll read a million things into text messages and forget to actually listen to people when they’re right there in front of me, attempting to communicate verbally. Oh and my personal favourite, I expend hours and hours of energy, time and thought on things that, ordinarily, would recede to the depths of my terrible memory in a matter of seconds. It is my fervent hope that somebody in the wide world will look past these hideous traits and see the hapless idiot within, take pity on her fumbling attempts to connect to other human beings and say ‘here, honey, don’t try so hard. I love you anyway.’.

- It’s all in the mind. Whether it’s exploring new genres or meeting people whom you have nothing in common with or having a sucky day, what you say to yourself has a lot to do with it. Actually having to type this here makes me feel like one of the stupid people referred to in point number one, but it had to be said. As Hector discovered in the book I finished last night (Hector and the Search for Happiness, by Francois Lelord), happiness is a way of looking at things.

Back to building web pages now!

Extracts:

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man–with human flesh.”

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

Also, someone posted this recently, and I love it so much. So much!

“The fault of our society always seems to me to be timidity and self- consciousness; and I feel oddly vehement, and very exacting, and so difficult to live with and so very intemperate and changeable, now thinking one thing and another.” – Virginia Woolf.

I’m so happy.

This is such a novel state, considering the hell that most of 2011 was, that I feel a blogpost is in order to commemorate it. I spent a lot of last year feeling badly about the rut I was in, and it burned slow and steadily into a perfectly horrible period that I can only call depression, for lack of a less overused term. I couldn’t really talk about it to anyone because they seemed to me to be part of the problem.

Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge now. Ever since my better self came to the fore and kicked the other, weepy, whiny half in the backside, I’ve been almost sickeningly optimistic (life’s-candy-and-the-sun’s-a-ball-of-butter optimistic, if you want to know).

I mean, I’m 22. The crabby 40-year-old inside me ought to slumber on for a decade or two more, at least.

:)

A year to let go of all the bad blood and insecurities, the fears and the self-pity and the dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Of course, it isn’t going to happen overnight. But I’d like to tell myself to forget about my pet peeves – being poor, not being perfectly knowledgeable about everything, being single – and just rejoice in being me. Well, in short, to attempt to think less about all the things I am not, and to celebrate all the things I am.

I’d like to learn more, to widen my intellectual horizons, to meet new people, to move beyond the past, to read lots, explore and discover everything from new haircuts to new food, and be healthier and happier all round.

Here’s to 2012!

So this year, I went a little wild. I stepped out of 18th and 19th century Britain (well, some of the time at least!) and wandered as far as Fantasia, WWI Europe, the 90s, contemporary New York, a futuristic England, 19th century China and post-Civil War Barcelona. And it was great!

So 2011 has been and gone, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that I managed twice the number of books in 2011 as I did in 2010 and 2009. There were loads of memorable reads, but since the general anatomy of lists only allows for 10 (and because I’m lazy and I don’t really think a top 50 books of 2011 makes much sense if I read only 60 books last year), here’s my list of the ten best books I read last year:

# 1 Passion – Jude Morgan – Jude Morgan is the pen-name of the very ordinarily named Tim Wilson. I approached his work with caution, because so many novelists specialising in historical fiction just use the genre as an outlet for their swords-and-corsets fantasies and don’t really expend much energy on really bringing a historical period to life. Though the distinctly romance-novelistesque pseudonym might set off warning bells in one’s head, Jude Morgan is an astonishingly good writer. I read two novels by him last year, the first being The Taste of Sorrow, which was a novel about the lives and loves of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. It was beautifully written, meticulously researched and painted a haunting picture of their lives on the edge of the wild, weather-beaten moors of North Yorkshire. But as satisfying as The Taste of Sorrow was, Passion was even better. Once again, the name and cover utterly belied the brilliance of the novel within: Passion is about the women who knew and loved Shelley, Byron and Keats, that is, Mary Godwin, Augusta Leigh, Lady Caroline Lennox and Fanny Brawne.

The novel once again bore signs of thorough research and a masterful handling of the sheer detail that any novel about the Romantic poets must contend with: many of the words spoken by the three poets came straight out of accounts of incidents in letters or diaries. In fact, this book was such a joy to read that I’m not going to rip it apart into brutal categories. It’s at the top of this list because it was a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. From Mary Wollstonecraft in the waning years of the 17o0s, to Mary Shelley in the middle of the 19th century, it’s a book about breaking barriers, fighting battles against yourself and society, and of course, about the terrible, awesome power love can wield.

# 2 Shelley: The Pursuit – Richard Holmes – I’ve always said Shelley is my favourite Romantic poet, but less as a result of in-depth study of his work than from some vague, lingering notion that he was a kindred spirit. Reading this book vindicated that belief a hundred times over. Percy Bysshe Shelley was a thoroughly remarkable human being whose ideas on free love and the distribution of wealth would still be considered radical today and Richard Holmes’ biography does a brilliant job of putting Shelley in the spotlight without a hint of bias or prejudice. Shelley’s naivete, his insensible cruelty towards those he loved is set alongside his almost selfless kindness; his fiery rage against marriage, monarchy, war and aristocratic society is marvellous to behold because it is so pure.

# 3 A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby – This book reminded me a lot of Waiting for Godot but it was a billion times funnier, nicer and filled with a lot more action. It’s about four people who inadvertently become entangled in each other’s lives because they meet on a terrace that is traditionally only visited by people looking to commit suicide by jumping off it. To say much more would be silly, because the book is just so singularly worthy of being read.

# 4 The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England – Ian Mortimer – This was a hilarious, in-depth and really informative book about the nitty gritty of life in a 14th century English landscape. Filled with gems like ‘May you and your very balls be blessed’ (an authentic medieval greeting). Reading it almost had me convinced that I’d have been happier living in England in the Middle Ages – despite the lack of modern plumbing, medicine and the occasional visits made by the Black Death. Fact you might not know: women were a lot better off in the Middle Ages than in the 18th and 19th centuries. They could own property and engage in business. However, they could still be raped, betrothed at birth, bartered over like property and very often died in childbirth.

# 5 Fables: Volumes 1 – 15 – Bill Willingham – I never read comic books as a kid. I’ve read a couple of Tintin stories, Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle but that’s it. This series was my first introduction to comic books and my god, I was hooked. It’s about fairytale characters who live in contemporary New York because their own lands have been conquered by the great and terrible Adversary. Much of their time is taken up with bureaucratic red-tape, and keeping their existence secret from all the mundanes walking around. But when you’ve got fairytale characters, figures of myth and legend and nursery rhymes all together in one place, great events and upsets can hardly be prevented from happening.

# 6 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – This would have been higher up on the list if I hadn’t so many other brilliant books this year. It’s a macabre, chilling tale, hypnotically written, and anybody who has ever been at university studying the arts will immediately identify with its themes.

# 7 V for Vendetta – Alan Moore – I was reading it when the London riots were on, and I kept seeing eerie parallels everywhere. ‘Happiness is the most insidious prison of all’ has got to be one of my favourite quotes of all time, along with ‘Ideas are bulletproof’.

# 8 Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh – Again, this would have been much higher up the list if I hadn’t read so many other great books. I’m still incredulous about the temerity of any country that would attempt to make money off the opium addiction of another country’s people, but the novel does a brilliant job of making you feel like you’re right in the thick of it: reading the sailors’ creole, jumbling with different words from languages you may or may not know is quite thrilling to someone who likes linguistic puzzles (like me!).

# 9 Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks – There can never be a book written about World War II that isn’t harrowing. By contrast with some of the other books I’ve read, Charlotte Gray is pretty sparse, in terms of the tone it uses to deal with the horrors of WWII and the Holocaust, but it’s that sparseness that throws characters, emotions and events into sharp relief.

# 10 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – If you like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you’ll like this one. It’s magical, shifting, constantly surprising and utterly unpredictable. Also, it features something called ‘The Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ and the plot hinges on a literary mystery of epic proportions. It’s set in Barcelona, and I was reading it when I travelled there, so it was quite perfect.

And because I can’t resist, here are my honourable mentions:

The Neverending Story – Michael Ende

The Siege of Krishnapur – J.G Farrell

High Fidelity – Nick Hornby

Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

The Taste of Sorrow – Jude Morgan

I’ve been watching football since 2002 – vaguely in 2002, then fanatically in 2006, when I wept for Germany’s exit in a semifinal, and faithfully in 2010, when I knew that internationally, Germany was the only team I’d ever support (I really fancy their chances in Euro 2012!). And yes, while my reasons for supporting Real Madrid began with the inexplicable adorableness of Mesut Ozil, you can’t really support an entire club just because you think one player is both adorable and a brilliant footballer. You quickly get sucked in, and before you know it, you’re reading eagerly about their plans for upcoming transfer windows, you’re reading about their plans to modify their stadium, and you’re reading about each player’s place in the team and you’ve got opinions on who matters more than whom.

And, of course, you’re finding yourself spending a good proportion of your monthly salary on stellar seats for a football match in Madrid and gazing in wonder at these men, whom you feel a strange sort of insidious kinship with, kicking a ball around in front of you. If Real Madrid vs Ajax in the Champions League could be so magical, I think one of the things I want to do before I die is be at the Santiago Bernabeu for a Clasico. What makes this match so special? I was thinking about it quite seriously, because I’m not really well-acquainted with Spanish history enough to take sides on the Catalonia issue. I suppose it’s because that’s the only game in which you can see two sides desperate to win and being forced to fight to within an inch of their lives for it. You’d expect Madrid and Barcelona to win against Levante, Sporting Gijon or even Athletico Madrid. Losing would be easily written off as a freak incident. But the Clasico is the real test of fire.

So yes, Real Madrid lost yesterday, 1-3. But of all the Clasicos I’ve watched featuring the present teams, this was the best game to watch. It was 90 plus minutes of pure football – marred here and there with the usual overt physicality employed by some players on either side – but still, more football than I’d ever seen before in a Clasico. And Benzema’s spectacular capitalisation on Valdes’ mistake was enough to make my heart beat faster, enough to make me hope, at least, for a favourable full-time score. That, I think, is something we couldn’t possibly have had last season. And really, for a Real Madrid fan who watched them grow last season to become the team with a fifteen match winning streak this season, that’s good enough for now.

The title’s not lost. The Champions League certainly isn’t. And there’s always that second leg at the Camp Nou…

- Toi et Moi, Paul Geraldy.

C’est vrai, cherie, c’est trop vrai.