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Studying implies five solid nighttime hours of Foucault, or maybe A Room of One’s Own, Carlyle’s crappy tract or Being and Time, which one hopes is not as depressing as that. The term may also be extended to include literary texts one would not be inclined to peruse if they weren’t on syllabus, Bleak House being the prime specimen in this category.

NOT, as it were, hours spent reading I Shall Wear Midnight. (It’s not even such a great book, honestly. Bit of a nostalgic trip. PTerry these days seems to only aim to keep up with his old work. The repetitions in plot and pattern are nearly deliberate and have a comforting quality to them, almost: you know what to expect from a Discworld book, and Pratchett faithfully delivers it. But the last time he made us gasp a little at something utterly brilliant and unexpected was Going Postal.  We feel almost threatened at the prospect of the upcoming Moist von Lipwig book: with each book we like him a little less, and we had been so mindblown by Moist when he had first arrived, by god.)

Anyway, the point of this post is to not be a book review, even surreptitiously behind the excuse of parentheses. This summarises our affinity for studying quite succinctly, however.