52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
42. Skindiving.
Little to say. Haldane is obsessed with sex and death; the body is very much on his mind, and so its dissolution. This book comprises his first three volumes. I’d read praise for his clear, no-nonsense approach — he’s very fond of iambic pentameter, the one form every schoolchild can identify — but I found there’s only so much you can say about sex, except to compare it to myriad things, especially oceans, but also apple-orchards, cozy snowbound cabins, the milky way. And then to be afraid of growing old and dying.
I liked this one, Bridegroom:
The river ice was rearing from its bed
in massive blocks forced upward by the thaw
as we passed by that morning to be married.
Later, out walking on slopes where snow had melted
exposing last year’s fallen leaves, you slipped -‘These oak leaves are murder,’ kicking them you said,
and I thought of the oak king, bound and crucified,
the drops of my blood trickling down his side.
