"Here's some books I'd like you to read!"

While I navigate my way through the final three "chapters" of Naked Lunch, interrupted by sporadic returns to the relative sanity of What Does A Martian Look Like?, I thought I'd peruse the rest of the source for this literary adventure and see how many authors I need to squeeze into my year. As with so many things in life, my memory cheated me a little.

Somewhat disappointingly, while the first verse includes four authors, the rest of the verses - and choruses - have none. Only the break (or middle eight, or bridge...I'm never sure of the correct terminology) has more, and then it's only six. That makes a grand total of ten, including the two you already know about. The Wikipedia entry for the song reveals that the original version had a few changes, so I can be a bit crafty and add two more, but that's still only twelve.

On the up-side, the authors are more diverse than I could have hoped, as you'll see when the next one comes up (I don't want to spoil it in advance). I'm still going to be expanding my literary geography far beyond the small patch visible from the top of my current bookshelves.

But, now it's obvious I'll have time to read plenty of other books this year, I'll be blogging about them too. For starters, my Mum gave me five great books for Christmas - four biographies of different sorts (next to good science writing, they're my favourite kind of non-fiction) plus the only one whose cover I've cracked so far: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. (Yes, I'm reading a book about how humans learned to read. It's things like this that makes you glad to live in the 21st century.) Plus I finally bought a book of essays about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, titled The Anthology at the End of the Universe; the first one is pretty good but covers ground plumbed much more in depth by the great Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, which I read last year. And there are other books I've promised myself I'll read, too.

Which all adds up, I hope, to an interesting chronicle of one fellow's reading. Don't worry, though: I'll still be sticking to the plan of getting through the Früvous authors by the end of the year. To keep things on topic, posts about the challenge (which includes all of them so far) will be tagged with "Bunch of Authors", and titled with lines from the song.

Hark at me, speaking as though to a vast audience. If anyone is reading this, do drop me a line. I'd love to know I'm not writing into the void!