It shouldn't be too bad. The skimming is work avoidance in a way, it's not real work, it doesn't involve Serious Thought, but I do need to get it done. The opera book will hopefully be straightforward. I was originally planning to plough through Shoshana Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" (about the novel, not the opera), but since I'm about to watch the film of the opera again, reading about that first made more sense.

But I'm not going to start just yet, so at the moment I'm looking up recipes for Savoy cabbage, having identified the strange green thing which arrived in this week's fruit & veg box as such, and reading Solzhenitsyn. I'm starting to identify with the characters in The First Circle (about a research prison in Stalinist Russia), which is a mite worrying. Well, if you're in prison (metaphorically in my case, ME is a real bugger), you may as well do research work while you're there, it's what I'd be doing anyway.