reading (A Passage to India)

I finished "A Passage to India" on Tuesday. It's the first Forster I've read.

Forster can turn on that over the top poetic description mode that saturates the colors and textures or a scene or a society to the point they drip. Done too heavily, it becomes intolerable, but Forster seems to have a knack for stopping just before that tipping point. His descriptions are rich as double chocolate cake but don't quite turn to purple prose.

You can choose to like all these characters or none. Each of them is endearing and despicable, which I suppose expressed as "human". You can say they are products of their society or that they are trapped by their circumstances. Endearing and despicable humans.

The underlying current of conscious hatred in this book is hard to take. That was, afterall, the point of writing the book. It's surprising Forster wasn't strung up in England when the book was published. It's hard to believe the situation limped along with very little progress for another 30 years after the book was published. Then again, social changes around attitudes always take much longer than changes caused by technology or economics.

38. E.M. Forster "A Passage to India"

ouch

This morning my back is notably tweaked. It's been a long time since I've had any problems, but simple movements this morning were causing those "can't breathe" stabbing pains. I was planning on taking it easy today anyway. Advil and stretching gently are the orders of the day. As some point I've got to make some chutney, but I'm not looking forward to standing at the counter.

The washing machine has been making a clunking noise, so today I opened the pump resevoir thing to see what might be in the trap. I extracted three coins and the top of a pen that was eaten maybe a year ago. It took some time for the pen top to work it's way to that point because I looked for it at the time it was eaten and couldn't locate it. Hopefully the removal will resolve the strange noise.

At some point I'm actually going to have to focus on getting the larger stuff on my list done, but today I'm sticking to the little things and being lazy.