The Sunday Salon - Life, Work, Letters & Everything

Hello Sunday Saloners. Today I'm going to refrain from apologizing for not having been around more lately. First because you've heard it all before, and secondly because I know everyone has busy lives as well, and that nobody is paying as much attention to the amount of blogging and commenting I do as I am myself.

Still, I'm sad that I haven't been able to read very much at all lately. Part of the reason is the pre-holiday business: writing and posting greeting cards, doing a bit of crafting, ordering gifts, preparing packages for friends and family who live abroad, etc. But there's also the fact that I'm still adjusting to working full-time. It's funny - last year I was studying and working part-time, so in theory I should have had less free time than I do now. But the fact is that I managed to read a lot more. Maybe it was because my schedule was a lot more flexible, and also because I'd sometimes get unexpected bits of reading time. It would happen when, for example, I finished an essay earlier than I had anticipated, or one of my lectures was cancelled. I remember that this happened when I was reading Fingersmith, and suddenly I had two hours to read to my heart's content. I swear, it was just like Christmas.

But despite the difficult adjustment, I'm very much enjoying my new job. I've talked about it a bit on Twitter, but I haven't here, I don't think. I'm working at the archives of a museum, cataloguing the correspondence (about five decades' worth of it) of a writer who passed away some years ago. I have to create an xml entry for each letter, and this entry includes a summary of the content. So I do have to read them all. But I'm very glad that I do, because the work would be a lot more repetitive and less interesting otherwise. It's the human side, the patterns, the narratives, the voices that emerge that make it interesting.

I like the fact that I already have a few favourite correspondents, whose voices I love and whose letters I look forward to. I like guessing at what the relationship between the recipient and the sender was. I even like the fact that, because we don't have the letters the writer herself sent, I only get half of the conversation and have to imagine the rest. It almost makes me want to write an epistolary novel where I could imagine the answers to all the questions I'm left with.

Speaking of which, do you have a favourite epistolary novel you'd recommend? There's 84 Charing Cross Road (not actually a novel, but it counts), of course, and I know of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. But I bet there are plenty of excellent ones I haven't even heard of. If you have a favourite book of actual letters, than I'd love to hear about it as well.

The fact that my reading has slowed down so much means I won't have as many books to post about, and so I'll probably be an intermittent blogger at best between now and Christmas. But I'll still be around as much as possible. Have a great Sunday, everyone!