A little light reading for New Year's Day

I might have stayed up until 4:30 this morning, but I'm not hung over. I'm not much of a drinker, except for wine with meals (okay, last night I had half a bottle of Asti Spumante--but as Martini & Rossi's Italian sparkler is just 7.5% alcohol, as opposed to the 10 or 12% in most table wines, you'd have to try pretty hard to get drunk on the stuff), so I've never understood why people get drunk on purpose. Is it really so much fun to make a fool of yourself and then throw up on your shoes and then finally pass out, only to awaken a few hours later feeling like you want to die?

Never mind. I'm not writing this to make anyone feel guilty. It's just that even though I've never experienced a hangover, I got a kick out of this article in Today's Guardian:

A really bad hangover can only be dealt with in stages. There is a lot of groaning to get through. There is that first, crucial cup of tea to be drunk. There is fried food - or at the very least a slice of toast - to be eaten. There must be more tea. And then there is the retreat to bed.
This is the stage at which some sort of reading matter becomes essential. How else can guilty thoughts of the night before - dammit, the year before - be kept at bay? The radio is TOO LOUD. The television is TOO BRIGHT. The internet is TOO CONFUSING.

Obviously the choice of book is crucial, and severely limited by certain physical constraints - if you can lift your head off the pillow for more than five minutes then you haven't really got a hangover, have you. So you can leave that Pynchon on the bedside table - it's too heavy. Those Penguin Classics are going to have to stay on the to-read pile as well - the print's too small. Surely any kind of thriller is going to be too energetic - explosions, running about and hanging chapters are hardly the thing to set you up for a nice snooze.

If I had a hangover--which I don't, for the reasons outlined above--I might reach for my husband's copy of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. I'd skip all the depressing stuff in A River Runs Through It and just read the beautifully crafted fly-fishing scenes. What would you read?

By the way, I collect English bone china teacups and saucers. Accompanying the Guardian article is a photo of a very pretty cup, and although I squinted to read the maker's name on the bottom, I couldn't see it on my little laptop's screen. Could one of you big-monitor people help me out?


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