The Australian Association of Writing Programs

I'm sitting here on my sofa, trying very hard not to do something.  Christmas always manges to send me into a kind of meltdown.  After a few days of shopping, writing cards, buying seafood and wrapping presents the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise starts to bother me.  Really bother me.  I feel coerced into putting so much effort into this thing, this gigantic many headed beast, and I resent it.  Usually because I'm tired; tired from the demands of academia, of being an early career researcher, of always wondering what comes next.  This tiredness differs from my other non-academic friends, those who know exactly what the next year will bring them, who don't think too hard about what comes next.

This inevitably leads me down the New Year's Resolution path, a path I'm not comfortable walking down.  A lot of us get duped into making promises we can't keep, a lot of us use this time of family, friends and extra stress to make over the top promises to ourselves.  I'm not sure waht this has to do with writing, though I do know what I'd like to do next, today, while my partner is sleeping on the sofa beside me, and my friend is curled on a mattress in my living room.  Read.  And so, I have a kind of plea.  Has anyone read any devestatingly good, eye-opening, you'll-never-think-of-words-the same-way-again (without hurting my brain) books I can read?  In fact, perhaps next year, we can find some way of having a running booklist on this site; recommendations for reading, for teaching, for writing.  That's not a resolution by the way.  Just an idea.