We are in high gear around our offices, finalizing everything for the 2012 Programme which is much closer than one might think when we have hundreds of events on the docket!

We have some excellent events and it takes all my efforts not to just "spill the beans" here today and let the world know about all the hard work we've done over the past five months. Still a lot more work to go but the period between now and the Festival is, in some ways, the calm before the storm. Yes, tons going on, but we all actually have time to do crazy things like answer emails and return all the voicemails that have been adding up!

In the meantime, I've been reading:

Haruki Murakami's 1Q84: I'm enjoying this book though not reading it as quickly as I usually might. One thing I appreciate about Murakami is the role that his protagonists often play, being on the margins of society, outsiders. Most protagonists in novels are outsiders to some extent, but his characters often literary exist at the margins: economically, spiritually, or they experience gender in a novel way. That's an appealing aspect to his writing. I wonder, though, if his characters are as developed as they might be: they are outsiders but we never really get much of a sense of what drives them necessarily. Personally, Murakami's work plays a similar role in my life as Woody Allen's: when he's good, he's great. When he's bad, ugh, unwatchable/unreadable.

Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story. I have to say that I resisted this book. I was worried it would be depressing or dark. But one afternoon, I was on my way to lunch and decided to grab the first book I found on the shelf which was this one. In a cafe near our offices, I started reading it and suddenly an hour had flown by and I couldn't stop. Took it home that night and read the rest of it in two sittings (Friday night and Saturday morning). It's so engaging and one gets such a strong sense of Oates' departed husband but also of Oates herself. Though it does have dark, impassioned moments, overall the book is tinged with a sense of urgency, as if she simply had to get this story out while all the details of what she was experiencing were still fresh in her mind. It's dark in the sense that it made me wonder what I would do in her situation. But in the end, I think, the book is hopeful.