We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I do feel, Lee Child, that this categorisation is a bit simple:

But I think it’s nuts that people think genre is easier than reaching a very small and reliable audience. Some good, middle-class Julian Barnes or Martin Amis reader, they don’t expect to be 100% satisfied with a book. They put it down and start the next one. When you’re a bestseller, you’ve got to satisfy the person that reads one book a year on the beach. If you leave him disappointed, he may never read another book.

Okay, I read a lot and I very very seldom expect to be 100% satisfied with a book, but the ones that ring the bell are all over the place. I won't say I expect to be satisfied by a book but you know, Middlemarch exists, Tam Lin exists, The Fountain Overflows exists, etc etc, I can always hope.

And what do we mean by being satisfied by a book anyway? I was in Slow Motion Trainwreck Relationship with a person who had some very weird stuff going on about reading and what they would or would not read and somehow being afraid of investing time in reading a book that might not be Right. It was not about satisfaction precisely, it was about having some internal template a book had to match.

Actually I suppose this rather went with making the occasional askance expressions and noises at the kind of things that I was reading, because I may not be entirely indiscriminate in what I read but I do have to be reading something and I will give quite a lot of things A Go.

I also wonder how one fits into the above paradigm people who do read a lot but want the exact same thing with just slight changes, which is also a market that bestsellers aim at, surely?

Also, are there literally people who only read one book a year when they're on holiday (and probably on the plane rather than the beach)?

On another paw (how many have I got up to?) there is Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love who would never read anything (except for Country Life, presumably, if he found the chub-fuddler there) after the transcendant experience that was White Fang.

I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:

He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Yeah, well, I'm over here going

a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?

b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)

c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

Last week's bread did some spectacular mould action, bah, so I made the light rye loaf from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, discovering as I weighed out the ingredients that I had rather less strong white flour than I thought and had to make up the requisite proportion with white spelt. Turned out v nice, though.

No Saturday breakfast rolls because of rushing off to conference.

Today's lunch: pork spare ribs, which I rubbed with a mix of maple sugar, hot and sweet smoked paprikas, black pepper, garlic salt, and salt, and left overnight, then wrapped in foil and cooked for 3 hours in a very low oven, then basted with what was more of a barbecue sauce than a glaze of a small tin of chopped tomatoes + apple vinegar + dashes of tabasco and worcester sauce, simmered together, and cooked at a slightly higher temperature for 45 or so minutes - v tasty if a little dry - possibly did not need quite so long at that final stage; served with tenderstem broccoli and okra simmered for 45+ minutes in coconut milk with ginger paste and fresh coriander (possibly a little overdone?); baked San Marzano tomatoes; and cornbread (plain white flour + baking powder, half and half with mixture of fine/coarse cornmeal).