Thank you Huxley

Antic Hay

I'm enjoying a bit of a reading renaissance. 

Maybe it's the turning of the seasons that breaths an instinct within me to snuggle down, in a comfy corner and disappear into someone else's life. It's about a book a week - or more accurately one a weekend at the moment.

I learnt to be a very speedy reader back in the days when devouring three/four books a week was standard procedure for keeping-up in BA English(with Media) classes. Then there was a time when 'the career' took over and books would be dipped into/skimmed/read but not consumed or unintentionally deserted for months at a time, so passages would be re-read over and over accidentally with only the vaguest feeling of deja vu. 

The follow up to 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls', which title evades me, is case in point - all I remember is that it concentrated heavily on the arrogant and fastidious early career of Quentin Tarantino, but was no way as engaging or memorable as 'Easy Riders' overview of the explosive arthouse scene in Hollywood during the 60s and 70s - before cinema got homogenized.

I really recommend devoting yourself to a book over a weekend. You're in absolutely no danger of forgetting characters, rereading chapters or loosing your page/makeshift bookmark. 

What I enjoyed more about consistently chugging through 'Antic Hay' by Aldous Huxley in less than 70 hours was the joy of finding new words and hunting down their definitions (somewhat lazily on my android). Maybe my vocab has diminished, or maybe it's just Huxley's superior possession of the English language but either way - there are some BIG FAT BUTTERY words in 'Antic Hay' and that's inspiring to me.

Here's some delicious, delectable Huxley-plucked words that I ear-marked because they're definitely worth trying to slip into conversation:

*Gormandizer = Someone who eats gluttonously; gorging

*Rabelaisian = Display of bawdy/earthy/course humor (Ref. to Francois Rabelais, a major French Renaissance writer of satire and bawdy jokes)

*Callipygous = Having beautifully proportioned buttocks

*Hobbledehoy = A clumsy or awkward youth

My favourite is hobbledehoy - mainly because of the way it makes your mouth feel quite awkward while saying it.