Alas the unread books

I've reluctantly had to give up the reading for writing for the time being -- or rather, the books I've been reading recently have mostly had titles like "How to Think Like Your Editor" (because I'm considering putting in a book proposal) and "Using Microsoft Office Word 2007" (because I want to get to grips with Quick Styles, and if possible customise the Ribbon, though that's probably beyond me). But I did read The Devils by Dostoyevsky, which is rather difficult because hardly anything happens for most of it. The edition I had printed as an appendix "Stavrogin's Confession", which apparently was too shocking to be included at the time. (Like Tess of the d'Urberville's seduction.) It was this excised chapter which made sense of the whole thing for me, so if you want to read the book make sure you get a copy which includes it. I read Imposture, by Benjamin Markovits, which reminded me strongly of Rose Tremain, which is of course a good thing. I also read Cooking with Fernet Branca, which is quite fun, and I bought a Turkish phrasebook for my Christmas trip to Istanbul. Opening it at random I found this: Beni sadece seks için kullanıyorsun, which means "You're just using me for sex". The rest of the sex section includes Yavaş ol!, "Easy tiger!", and Endişelenme ben hallederim, "Don't worry I'll do it myself". Great stuff. It had seemed to me that the bad chat-up lines section of phrase books, which always used to be called "At the disco" or some such, had gone out of fashion of late, and I blamed it on the whole AIDS thing, but I suppose AIDS isn't the terrifying death sentence it once was, or maybe it's just Turkey. I'm going with a pretty blonde friend, so I'd probably better memorise some protective swear words...