Books read:

Anita Brookner - Look at me

Lydia Davis - The collected stories of Lydia Davis

Lewis Carroll - Alice's adventures in Wonderland

DUTY LARGELY CONSISTS OF PRETENDING THAT THE TRIVIAL IS CRITICAL

I re-evaluated myself. I saw that I was from now on, for ever, contemptible. I had been, and remained, intensely depressed, but I had also been, and always would be, intensely false: in existentialist terms, inauthentic. I knew I would never kill myself, I knew I would always want to go on living with myself, however hollow I became, however diseased.

I raised the gun and fired it blindly into the sky. The crash shook me. There was an echo, some falling twigs. Then the heavy well of silence.

You watch and you despair. Or you despair and you watch. In the first case, you commit physical suicide; in the second, moral.

By searching so fanatically I was making a detective story out of the summer's events, and to view life as a detective story, as something that could be decuded, hunted and arrested, was no more realistic (let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least.

- The Magus, John Fowles

Simply one of the best books I have ever read.