Insomnitractors?

Why am I awake at 5am? I guess the real reason is simply that I'm not very good at sleeping. After one or two nights of good sleep, my mind seems to rebel. 'Oh no,' it says, 'not falling for that old trick again. Sleep? There must be thousands of more interesting things to do!'

And so here I am, having spent the night reading Marina Lewycka's novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and typing up notes to do with Northern Cross. I quite enjoyed the novel, in a light reading sort of way: it was diverting. The front cover describes it as "extremely funny" and "mad and hilarious". I have to say that I didn't really spot either of these attributes (although for part of the book I did get an odd feeling that I was missing something - that jokes were being made at somebody's expense, only I was not quite sure whose, and that I was missing the point by taking things too much at face value. Whether this had more to do with the increasingly tired state of my brain than the author's intentions, I cannot be sure).

On the subject of books... Waterstone's once again lured me in with their three-for-two offer. This time I had a good excuse, in the form of a book token I needed to spend (it had started falling apart). Almost every book I could see looked like it had some form of special offer sticker on it today. In the end I opted for a biography of Jane Austen which I've been wanting to read for a while, and a couple of novels I'd seen reviewed in my brother's old copy of Books Quarterly. All of which ought to give me something to keep my brain happy the next time it decides to go insomniac.