Goodreads tells me that I read 25 books this year. You ought to be able to see a list of them here. 25 isn’t that many, but i’ve been busy. Give me a break.

Two questions:

1. Anyone know of a book listing site which isn’t owned by a tax-avoiding global corporation?

2. Notice anything unusual about this list of 25 books?

No reason you should, so let me tell you. If you ignore ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘At The Mountains of Madness’ – both re-reads, listened to this year rather than read – and two graphic novels, then I haven’t read a single work of fiction in 2013.

I wasn’t fully aware that a shift was happening, if indeed one has happened. I did however begin to feel that things were changing every time I approached my ‘to read’ shelf for a new book, or looked online or, on the odd occasion, in an actual bookshop for things to stock that shelf with. Fiction just hasn’t had a look in, where up to this point it has completely dominated.

Why? I’m struggling to put my finger on it, and am vacillating between two diametrically opposite explanations, both made plausible, triggered perhaps, by one central fact: I’m getting old.

Now I come to think about it, and to cast back to the reading choices I made this year, imposing a retrospective rationale, I fancy I can divine two possible motives. Firstly, novels seemed too insubstantial. I must have felt, did and do indeed feel, that I need to understand more of how the world works and to do so in more direct terms. I’ve been interested in stuff, and have wanted to find out more. In some clunking way, I felt that novels had less to teach me.

I know that’s silly. I know that novels can give unparalleled access to the heart of what it means to be human, to be alive here and now, or there and then. So here comes theory number two: perhaps I don’t want to know. Facts are fine. I’ve read loads of them this year. Now, without looking at the list of books, I can remember very few. I learned about the notion of cosmic war as a driver for religious conflict. I learned that World War 2 was significantly more grim that most of us could possibly imagine. I learned some stuff which was helpful for work. I learned that David Sedaris lived in Japan for a while. I learned that the CIA has been lurching around in the dark for the last 50 years.

I guess there’s a bunch of other stuff I learned which is in there somewhere. But how does that help me? Could it be that all this fact gathering (and dropping) is just displacement activity? A means to avoid the real, harsh truths that sometimes fiction reveals most effectively?

Both these explanations sound simultaneously as banal and overblown as each other. I’m back where I started. I haven’t read any novels this year because I haven’t wanted to. I do feel that this is because of some tapping sense of change, of urgency, but I can’t say with any certainty whether this leads me to want to know more about life, or to know less.

I have four novels on my ‘to read’ shelf right now. ‘Austerlitz’, ‘Oryx and Crake’, ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ and ‘All Quiet on the Orient Express’. I’m going to get one of them down and see what happens.

This morning, on Facebook, an old friend of mine asked me this question:

“Why are you not a full-time music journalist???”

He’s no journalist himself, you should know, so we’ll forgive him the over-enthusiastic punctuation.

There are a few answers to this question and, the longer I delayed sending a facebook-sized response, the more they enumerated. I thought I would write them down. Here’s where I got to.

1. I’m not good enough

Really. That’s not false modesty, or dismal compliment fishing, it’s a plain fact. Writing about music is everywhere now. Lots and lots and lots of people do it. I don’t read a huge amount of it, but what I do leaves me reeling. Whether it’s a 140 character tweet or a 2000-word essay, the wit, insight and sheer depth of thought that goes into much of the writing out there these days is something to behold. Take into account how quickly some of this stuff appears, thought constructions which would take me weeks to arrange and complete even if I could, and there’s only one conclusion to draw. I’m not good enough.

Actually, there’s a second possible conclusion: that the Universe is governed by an omnipotent robot god with a degree in cultural studies, and the big metal arsehole is dicking me around.

2. I don’t know enough

From the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, I felt like I pretty much knew what was happening in contemporary pop, rock and alternative music, and had a decent grip on hip-hop and emerging electronic music too. Nowadays i’m nowhere. In fact i’m so far from being anywhere that I stopped even trying to swim for shore many years ago. Treading water can be nice. It’s fun and satisfying to write again about records I loved years ago (and really great on the rare occasions when these bits strike chords with other fans, or even the creators, of the music – hello Dart and Dumb) but ask me to tie these records in to a topography of the current musical landscape and, well, nope. You might as well ask an etchasketch artist to draw a map of the fourth dimension.

3. I don’t even know what I think about music any more.

The more I think, the less I know. In some circles, realising this is a sign of enlightenment, of self-realisation. For me it’s a sign of weakness of opinion, of muddiness of thought, paucity of reference, lack of critical imagination or, in some cases, just plain failure of memory (“Oh hey guys, this sounds just like…! Oh damn, I had it there for a second…”)

4. I’m not sure I want to know.

When I tell my wife that I love her, she sometimes asks me “why”. I tell her I don’t know and I don’t want to know. If I knew why, I’d have it figured out for good, and I could stop. I don’t want to stop.

5. I was, once.

For ten years or so I wrote for The Big Issue in the North and for more than half that time I was Music Editor. I enjoyed it, most of the time. I got to hear a load of music I would never have come across otherwise, and that turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. For years, I had to produce three album reviews each week. That’s no chore but, once you start to factor in real life, including a full-time job, then the available time begins to slip through your fingers. From time to time I would spend a lot of time getting to know a record, developing my thoughts and finding the perfect formulation to allow me to squeeze these, along with some of the facts and also, ideally, some entertaining turns of phrase, into 150 or 300 words. Occasionally.

By the time I finished, if necessary, I could complete a perfectly acceptable 150 word review before i’d finished my first listen to almost any record. When I began writing about music for my university Student Newspaper I did so not because I wanted personal exposure but because I wanted to try to work out what made me love the music that was, by then, so central to my life and sense of self. By the time I finished, I seemed to be farther away from reaching my initial goal than ever.

The sheer volume of stuff I was sent and had to listen to shaped my tastes and listening habits in ways i’m only just starting to appreciate. When I came out of that period, I was relieved. For years, the music I had spent time with had almost entirely been dictated by whatever was in the envelopes which came through my door each week. My tastes were being developed by PR people. By the time I was done, I wanted control back again and, along the way, I chucked away dustbin loads of CDs.

Now, years later, my taste ranges across a wider spectrum than it did before those piles of records passed through my hands. I love lots of music a great deal, but I no longer know the names of tracks, players, producers. Instead i’m flighty, skittering from place to place, craving those moments when something comes along which is totally beyond my frame of reference. Without the enforced catholicism of those listening years I might know the name of every Pavement song, but I dare say I might have just stopped there.

6. I’m not driven enough.

When I used to write a lot about music I was happiest when I was doing it for my own satisfaction, as an exercise. Those few pieces I wrote which I can still remember being most happy with are those that, whilst writing them, brought me to an epiphany about some aspect of the record, artist, genre or myself.

I never felt like I wanted to spend any time persuading other people to publish or read my writing. Most jobbing music writers do have this feeling, I think.

7. I’m not even sure such things exist any more.

I guess they do, but full-time? I wonder how many people can count themselves full-time professional music writers in the UK? A few dozen? I refer you to my previous points 1 and 6.

8. I’m a full-time something else.

So, you know, now I have even less time than I have inclination.

9. I am. And so is everyone else.

To the extent that I want to be, I am. I started writing about music fully 8 years before the word ‘blog’ was first coined. Now everyone who wants to can write about music and share their writing with the world. Sure, sure, that’s good and bad, but for someone like me who just wants to figure stuff out once in a while, and doesn’t want or expect to set the world on fire, that’s just fine.

So, thanks for asking the question Simon. Hope this covers it. I wish I had more time to do something about points 1, 2 and 3, but for now, i’m pretty happy with my ability to write when I want, even if not with what I tend to produce.

We have new neighbours, two doors down.

The couple who moved out, Beardy Man and Mrs Beardy, always seemed nice. I never had an actual conversation with them. We’ve lived two doors up from them for ten years. Almost the only thing I know about them is that he used to work in a timber place and would bring offcuts home and burn them in their open fire. This once led to a chimney fire which came close to burning out the thatched roofs along the entire row, including the house we would later buy. My next-door neighbour the other way told me this and he may have been speaking about a previous occupant of the erstwhile Beardy residence.

A van was outside there this evening when I came home. It’s gone now and there’s a light on in one of the upstairs windows.

I read something recently about what seemed to be yet another ‘neighbour’ found dead after several days of no-one missing her. No-one checks up on anyone any more. Even the two neighbours either side, who we really get along with, we can go weeks without seeing. We wouldn’t notice if they were extraordinarily rendered to a foreign country, nor they us.

I hope this is mainly to do with the arrangement of our houses. Certainly we’d like to spend more time with them but no space out front and high fences out back seem to mitigate against it.

We’ve been here a decade now, a quarter of our lives. We love it, but those immediate neighbours aside, I don’t think we actually know anyone else in the village. That’s okay, but it’s not okay.

Perhaps that will change. We have new neighbours.

It’s been a year since I wrote here.

It’s been a year in which I stopped doing a lot of things.

More on this later, if I can retain this pace.