(Figuratively walks up to the imaginary microphone). "Testing...testing...anybody out there?" (There is a deafening silence. Tumbleweed blows across the Internet).
Thought not.
At any rate, before I start throwing around my disjointed thoughts for others to put together, a few words about what I'm doing here. Basically, I read a lot of books. Novels, short stories, scifi, fantasy, history, current affairs, travel literature, politics, popular science...To paraphrase the hymn: each little book that's published, I love to read them all. My idea of a great day out is a trip to Hay-on-Wye. Whenever I visit London, I invariably end up going both to Charing Cross Road and the giant Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus. There are 17 books on my desk right now, on everything from McCarthyism and Chinese foreign policy to the creation of the published "Silmarillion". I even have a little journal in which I make a note of each and every book I read cover-to-cover so that in later years I can look back and roll my eyes at my youthful pretension. (Last year's total was 75, for the record).
Like most sentient beings, I also have my own opinions about everything I read. Sometimes these are fairly profound, sometimes shallow. However, whatever I think about a book while I'm reading it, I am invariably remiss when it comes to recording it. This means that most of my thoughts never evolve into anything more sophisticated than inchoate thoughts that flap briefly around my brain before being displaced by thoughts of dinner and next week's essay. Then, in a year or two, all that book is to me is a title on a page, on more tome ploughed through in the name of beating the previous year's total. So, I've set this blog up with the intention of posting something (be it a single paragraph, a lengthy analysis, or the single word "Shit") about each and every book I read. Hopefully, this will help me to remember the books I've read a little better, as well as forcing me to engage more with my own opinions about them. And even more hopefully, there just might be other people out there who are interested in my views.
And the title, you ask? The "Macondo" part comes from one of my favourite books of all time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad, which is of course set in the town of Macondo. As for "Public Library", I don't really know - maybe it's just the updated version of the old Catala's bookshop, though I'm unlikely to be posting too much about medieval chivalric romances. (I'll leave those to Don Quijote).
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