Boards done, taxes filed: and now for something completely different

Books read: 
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes
The Ode Less Travelled, by Stephen Fry
Winter Holiday, by Arthur Ransome
Rhyme's Reason, by John Hollander
The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard
A Shropshire Lad, by A.E. Housman
English Verse, Early Lyrics to Shakespeare, various

So I really, really, really enjoyed the Stephen Fry book, up until the very last page: he's chatty and funny and passionate about his subject, and his examples are beautifully clear, and although I didn't quite feel moved to follow all his instructions to the letter (going to get a pencil and attempting actual poetry myself) I really did do as he asked and read a lot of the poems aloud and then on the very last page he BLEW IT. A book like this works because the author constructs, along with the how-to manual aspect of things, the cozy illusion that you (the reader) are (a) as competent/literate as he is and that (b) it's just the two of you, BFF's all the way, chatting about poetry. And then on the very last page, he says a bit pompously that he hopes you had fun, but whatever you do, do NOT send him any of your pathetic attempts at poetry because he's crazy busy and important, with all his squillions of fans and it's just too overwhelming (well, he doesn't quite say it like that, but that's the underlying message). What a snot! So I returned my copy to the library, bought a used copy (because one day when I have oodles of spare time haha I really am going to go through and do it properly, doing all the exercises), and as soon as it arrived, I tore out the last page. (Not that I would ever send Stephen Fry anything I'd ever written, but really. I should note that I have now, courtesy of my lovely sister, actually met Nick Hornby after a reading/interview in SF recently, and I was an extremely restrained well-behaved sort of fan. Mostly because he looked as if he was dying to go back to his hotel room and have a smoke and not have to talk to anyone, which is fair enough). So there you go, Stephen Fry, you have incited me to wanton vandalism of literature. I hope you're happy.
April is, it turns out, National Poetry Month, and I have been on a little mini-binge of poetry reading and semi-memorizing, as an antidote to all that studying for my boards exam, getting my taxes done, etc. It's distressingly easy to get through an entire day without thinking once about beauty and pleasure and the very particular joys of the English language, so I have been shopping around with me an elegant little leatherbound English Verse as well as a paperback of A.E. Housman in an effort to combat that. I know that words are the important part of all this, and physical books per se aren't supposed (?) to matter, but sitting down on the train and pulling out my ancient leatherbound English Verse with its funny indented type and little ribbon placeholder and age-spotted tissue-paper-thin pages to try and hash through the prologue of the Canterbury Tales made me HAPPY. (Wow, two paragraphs in a row ending with the word 'happy.')'
Julian Barnes: love/hate. Deliciously aquiline and clever the once I heard him speak (reading, SF) (and there I was _not_ a good well behaved fan: I gushed, and I recommended someone else's book to him, which I think is probably tacky), some of his books meh, some of them love love love. I really enjoyed Nothing To Be Frightened Of, because, well, I think about death a lot and how much longer I have and how I am going to die and whether I will feel ready to die when the time comes or whether I will be in a frantic panic suddenly realizing all the time I've wasted doing stupid things like writing blogs that no one reads, and knowing that other people, who seem to have things more or less together, are also terrified of death, somehow does make it a tiny bit easier. Here's a confession: when I have attended patients' deaths, I always say to family members that I don't think the person is in any pain, but the truth is I DON'T KNOW AND NOBODY DOES. Also, wtf, even if you're not in pain, what if you're absolutely terrified of ceasing to exist - I don't know that morphine does much for that. Anyway. This is not a paragraph that can easily be made to end in the word 'happy.'
Ha.
Anyway. Kate Atkinson: good, time-travelly, some nice strong images but I didn't ever feel that I knew the people. Rhyme's Reason - more concise less chatty/funny version of Stephen Fry's book. Winter Holiday - Arthur Ransome has definitively replaced my Harry Potter guilty secret anti-insomnia aid. The Invention of Love - I think I'd need to see it staged. I enjoyed the Wikipedia article about A.E. Housman better...