Currently loving the title track from the new Trashcan Sinatras album, Weightlifting

It’s been a lonely winter hibernating away,
You need a little sunlight on that face.
How long can you stay in the darkness?
Dust round the empty nest?
You could make your way out,
If you lay down the load.

You will find a great weight lifting,
Easing your mind, a great weight lifting,
Leave it behind, a great weight lifting,
You will find a great weight lifting,
Just leave it behind, a great weight lifting,
and you will find, a great weight lifting.

You can hear a chunk of it on the intro page to their official site, linked above. Something about the slightly jangly guitar and the soft, smooth ever-so-gently-Scottish voice of singer Francis Reader (brother of another Scottish artist I really admire). Yum.
While we’re doing the media thing, might as well be time for a roundup.

Well, when we went away on holiday at the end of September, I took the following:

Naked - David Sedaris
I’ve been working my way through the Sedaris oeuvre over the summer, starting with the excellent Me Talk Pretty One Day, via the slightly odd Barrel Fever and the more easily accessible Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Naked had more in common with Me Talk Pretty… than Barrel Fever, and it was a fairly light read, which was just about right for the flights.

In a similar vein, sort of, I took along Augusten Burroughs’ novel Sellevision, a sort of vacuous darkly comic tale of the soulless world of television shopping. If you’ve ever watched too much QVC (or worse, Ideal World) in the wee small hours, you’ll recognise a lot of this novel, or at least imagine you can. To be honest, I whipped through this in an afternoon and an evening, punctuated by a swim and a wander down the beach, and it left barely any impression on me. I much prefered his memoir, Running With Scissors. Real life is so much more engaging - especially when it’s a bit odd.

Speaking of real life, I lugged the gigantic tome My Story containing Dave Pelzer’s trilogy of growing up as an abused child (A Child Called It), dealing with foster care (The Lost Boy) and…well, I can’t tell you the rest - not because it’s some big secret, but because I, er, didn’t get that far. I’m sure I will at some point. But I have to admit it wasn’t exactly condusive to lying around during siesta, gazing out across the sea to Morocco in the late September heat. Nope. Not at all.

I also brought along Stiff, Mary Roach’s fascinatingly macabre (macabrely fascinating?) look at the curious lives of human cadavers. Again, not exactly holiday reading, but really interesting in an I’ll-never-look-at-a-steering-wheel-in-the-same-way-again sort of way.

I must confess that I got so relaxed at the villa that I found myself reading (well, flicking through) the several issues of Hello that some previous visitor had left. Who are all these women with iron hair, weatherbeaten skin and sparkly frocks? A total mystery.

I also did many crosswords. I find doing crosswords strangely relaxing. Go figure.

On the way out, though, in Gatwick at dawn, I spotted that the masterful Douglas Coupland has a new one out - Eleanor Rigby. Now, I read a lot, and I like a lot of different kinds of books, but I literally consume Coupland books, and I’m trying to pace myself to finish my current read before I can justify buying his new one in hardcover. Such indulgence!