Christmas Books Past and Present

Christmas usually brings me at least a few books. Whenever quizzed about what I would like for Christmas, my list is ever-simple: good espresso-ground coffee, wine, dark chocolate or a book. I'm easily pleased. This year I already know that I am getting the second Loeb volume of Epictetus (books III & IV, plus the Enchiridion). Hurray! I love the Loeb series: the handy-size, the small, neat font, the air of studiousness that they give out. I strive to collect them and have serendipitously bought a number from charity shops which tend to price them cheaply (best buy: 2volumes of Aristotle's Historia Animalium; £7 for both. I use small chunks to teach Greek to The Boy). With Christmas books I generally have to make specific requests and direct the purchaser to the most appropriate outlet. I remember one year asking for 'Spartan Women' by Sarah(?) Pomeroy and saying that it could be bought from the classics department at a certain bookshop (I'd actually seen it on the shelves). However I got a story back that it wasn't in stock, they'd never heard of it so they couldn't order it. All patently untrue. I sulkily took myself in, the week after Christmas, picked off the very shelf where I'd last seen it and bought it for myself. Not sure what happened there.

I often ask for easy reading at this time of year: Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled', 'Pistache' by Sebastien Faulks, Alan Bennett, that sort of thing. Last year though, my Christmas reading was the New International Greek Testament Commentary on the Gospel of Luke by I.Howard Marshall. Fascinating.

I have finished 'This Breathing World' by Jose Luis de Juan, purchased last week. It was well-written (or at least, well-translated) but I'm not really sure what was going on with the plot: two parallel storylines nudge up against one another, but there is no satisfying unifying denouement (which it cries out for), just a low-key trailing off. I was (and still am) running a temperature whilst reading it, so it was all a bit vague and fever-dreamlike. I should get on with some serious reading: Constantine Campbell, Stanley Porter and Bernard Comrie, but I think I'll wait until I feel better for those heavyweight guys.

I'm going to start my Hardy novelette ('The Well-Beloved') either today or tomorrow, if my eyes stop aching. It always takes me a while to get into Hardy's idiolect, but I do love his writing so.

The annotated Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass was a revelation: so interesting, and Lewis Carroll's wordplay breathtaking. It can be savoured so much more as you get older. Sometimes I think that childrens' books are wasted on children!

I am trying to resist the newspaper book supplements: there are always so many books that I fancy reading at any given moment. I used to note them down for future reference, but the backlog is now just getting ridiculous. My dog-chewed (as opposed to dog-eared) notebook must remain firmly closed for a while.

...and the Greatest of These is Charity

Aren't charity shops great? Particularly our local Oxfam shops which have two dedicated second-hand book shops in York. A lot of students hand in their course books and it was obviously as a result of one such clear-out that I managed to source Bernard Comrie's book 'Tense' as recommended by my supervisor. How cool is that?

Yesterday also saw me pick up a copy of Moises Silva's commentary on Galatians - a most excellent find as I was beginning to worry about my lack of date-spread commentary-wise. This has an interesting section on discourse and literary structure which I am looking forward to digesting over the next few weeks.

Meeting a friend in Borders, I arrived early and idly looking through the shelves found that they finally had in stock a paperback copy of 'This Breathing World' by Jose Luis de Juan - I'd asked last year if they could get hold of one but, unsurprisingly, they could find no mention of it on their database.

Lexicomania

And again. The Christmas shopping season is not conducive to abstemiousness on the bibliomania front. And yesterday I was put at risk of overindulgence when a friend cried off our coffee/chat at the last moment. Since I was in town anyway with the intention of picking up a few festive wotsits, I suddenly found myself with a couple of extra hours spare until the parking ticket expired. As I wanted one of those Advent candles with the dates marked off (yes...we had to have a massive burn-up to get to the appropriate date last night), I went down to the Barbican book shop which not only stocks That Sort of Thing, but has an extensive second-hand theology/religion section. I just popped upstairs to survey their latest acquisitions (recalling my luck with the two ICC's last week) and nestling on the Biblical language shelves...lo and behold! Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon in pristine condition! There's something funny that happens to my brain when I see (a) a lexicon and (b) Greek script....I don't know what it is, and if the font size is sufficiently miniscule, I actually start to hyperventilate and fiscal prudence flies out of the window. I bought it, on the grounds that it was 'coded with Strong's concordance numbers' and the definitions and cross-references seemed superbly detailed. In my defence I did have it open on my desk today and did use it for my analysis of the Galatian verb forms. OK...shall I tell you what else I was using (i.e. had open) whilst I was working, so you can see the extent of my mania? Here's the list, and it does not take into account the shut-up ones in the small book stand adjacent:

i) The Interlinear KJV-NIV Parallel New Testament

ii) Hans Dieter Betz's 'Hermeneia' commentary on Galatians

iii) Bauer's Greek-English Lexicon of the NT and Other Early Christian Literature

iv) The Oxford Classical Dictionary (to look up Grammarians)

v) Moulton and Geden's Concordance of the NT

vi) Han's Parsing Guide to the Greek NT (see last week's post)

vii) E de Witt Burton's ICC commentary on Galatians

viii) Swete's 3rd volume of the LXX (for looking up a cross-ref. in Isaiah)

ix) NA27

You see....I just can't be trusted around small Greek print.

I shan't tell you that I actually put an illustrated Jeromite missal back. It was volume 3 of 3, and the others were not there. DG.

So of course I ended up not buying a modern first edition for my new god-son. I stayed traditional and he ended up with a RSV-CE New Testament and Psalms, which is good and clear but not too trendy. Doubtless he will never even look at it, but it's there if he wants to.

Another week of prolific book buying: I have been looking for ages for a 'How To...' book on doing a PhD and blow me if two don't come along at once! Browsing in Borders whilst the pregnant daughter availed herself of the toilet facilities, I came across a couple of OU publications, 'How to Write a Thesis' and 'The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research'. Only the former was priced - at £17.99!!! Recognising that buying both would be impossible, I took the latter (unpriced) to the check-out where I was informed that it -although slimmer - was £18.99. Laughing hollowly I told them that as far as I was concerned, they could...er...reshelve it.

Doctoral studies means that my book buying has been cranked up a notch. A rather expensive notch at that. Some books are just so useful or seminal that it is practically mandatory to possess one's own copy. Thus it was with Albert Rijksbaron's 'The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek' and Constantine Campbell's hotly debated 'Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek', purchased from The Book Depository through Amazon, rather than directly from the former. Likewise my mother who wanted to buy me a 'useful' book for Christmas (i.e. one that I will actually use) found herself unable even to order the Loeb second volume of Epictetus from Borders, garnering nothing but a gormless smile from the unfortunate girl behind the information desk. God knows what antiquated data base they use. I was left to source the book online (again from the BD via Amazon - a bit cheaper than buying direct from BD strangely, even including the added on P&P). Whilst on the web I also ordered the two OU publications at £5 less each than the shop price. So - oh joy!- five books plopped through my letter box this week, one of which I am passing on to be wrapped and returned on Christmas Eve *rolls eyes*.

Oh, and by-the-by I bought a holiday reading book too: the Wordsworth Press's edition of Thomas Hardy's 'The Well-Beloved'. I thought that I had read all Hardy's works when expecting child #3, but this one seems to have escaped me. At £1.99, an absolute bargain. I look forward to waking early on the Christmas morns in order to read before the family awakes.