Cathy Rentzenbrink

I'm not helped by the fact that they were also a bit drunk on the free drink because they were probably a bit hungry because it was near payday.

And I observed all of this and I thought, I will never be in that situation.

I will never not know something about someone that they have put in a book and then be drunkenly opining to them about how hilarious I think their book is.

when they clearly are having... They keep wondering when I'm going to say, oh, and I'm sorry about the bit at the end.

It never came.

It sounded a bit weaselly and after the fact to me, a little bit like, oh, these people keep telling me things now.

I'm just going to say that they're not allowed to say it because I had thought this all through in advance, honest gov.

And actually, it's just my miniature Bayer and I can say what I like, which, I mean, I think I'm going to channel more Bayer in future interviews.

It's just miniature Cathy Rensenbrink.

If you don't like that thing I did in chapter nine, okay.

Yes, I'll read a little bit.

So... I liked the book, but the second half for me was where it really oomphed off and got going.

So...

The most common literary confrontations are those that occur in our social lives, and of these, the most vexing are those in which we're expected to express ourselves in front of a group.

On such occasions, the conversation may turn to a book we have not read.

If the book in question is assumed to be known by all cultivated individuals, or if we make the error of blurting out that we have read it, we may find ourselves forced to try to save face.

This is an unpleasant situation, no doubt, but with a little finesse, we may extricate ourselves from it at no great cost by changing the subject.

But it's easy to imagine such a situation turning into a nightmare in which the person being forced to speak about a book he hasn't read is subjected to the rapt attention of an entire audience eager to know his thoughts.

Such circumstances bring to mind what Freud calls the examination dream in which the terrified dreamer imagines himself summoned to an exam for which he is not prepared and which calls back to consciousness a whole series of buried childhood fears.

So I picked that bit because I have the examination dream all the time.