In training for the Sydney Writer's Festival, I've decided I need to finish the books I've started (those on the top of the pile next to my bed). Until then, I'm not allowed to buy or borrow new ones because I don't deserve them.

Over the years, I've become a hopeless reader. When I was a kid, I used to read every book from cover to cover, and then read every other book by that author, in order of books written. Now, I'm hopeless.

You know on your computer, if you press ALT and TAB at the same time, it flicks between one program and another? That's how my life works. There I am, working on a film and then ALT + TAB I'm also working at the Comedy Festival but ALT + TAB I'm working at the Law Foundation and ALT + TAB I'm working at Radio National. All the other windows are open and the programs are running and stuff, but I'm flicking between them all the time, so I never quite optimise my experience.

That's how I read, too. I've had Alan Bennett's new book (which is so funny and brilliant) next to my bed since I ordered it online so I'd get it before anyone in Australia could claim to have read it before me. Several ALT + TABs later and I still haven't finished it but I've read several Joanna Murray-Smith plays, two brilliant scripts by Tom Stoppard and the beginning of a book called Boyhood by Coetzee. I also started a book by Will Self but I lost it down the back of the bed somewhere and I wasn't sure I didn't resent and despise it anyway, so at least this way I don't have to find out.

I do feel so guilty about these books I don't finish. It's a form of infidelity, not unlike when you have to turn off a CD in the middle of a really intense bit where the singer is belting out a particularly complicated couple of bars of climax and you have to rush out of the house but you know you're not paying enough respect to Aretha, or Buckley, or more likely if I'm being honest, Ben Folds.

Anyway, point being, book-wise, I am turning over a new leaf. Last night, after visiting Penny's and Yianni's shows (yay for them by the way, they're selling out)... I went home.

Yes! Home. Not to the Festival Club. Not to a Kitson gig or to support one of the local heroes or to a bar to hang out with people I don't see enough of anymore. I went home, I had a bath and I finished Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Yay for Tom Stoppard being clever about British snobbery and writing good characters for women and being a little bit obscure and making you wish you'd studied history right the way through university.

So, I'm on my way. For a lovely take on the reading of books, check out this. Nick Hornby, writer of things like About a Boy, writes a column about what he reads versus what he plans to read every month. Depressingly, he reads more than I do and complains about not reading much and being a philistine. But all that will change now I'm sure and I will become the sort of person Nick Hornby wishes he could be. Or not. We'll see how that one pans out.

Last, ALT + TAB, a dig at The Age, which I realise is a dead horse, but COME ON. Yesterday, they (the Melbourne newspaper that sponsors the comedy festival) ran reviews of Ross Noble (who so desperately needs a good review), two people with national TV shows, and two Americans.

Good. Excellent. So people know what the things they won't be able to get into because they're SOLD OUT are going to be like. What a service to the community.