And On the Third Day....

We spent a wonderful couple of days in Barcelona and had the chance to 'test-drive' a couple of guidebooks that we took with us. The winner was, without a doubt, the Dorling Kindersley 'Eyewitness Travel' guide to Barcelona and Catalonia. For a city that is rich in visual treats, it is absolutely essential that any guidebook gives a foretaste of them, and this is where the Time Out guides fail to engage, despite their comprehensive information. OK if you're wanting info about Wolverhampton or Karlsruhr: just not up to the job for Rome, Venice or Barca! The simple area-by-area format allowed us to plan our routes using simplified maps and gave us an idea of the treasures on route. A concise guide to the travel arrangements, culture, food and nightlife - plus recommendations on where to eat and where to avoid - enhanced the whole trip, as did the more comprehensive street plans and index in the back. We actually didn't buy this, but borrowed it from our local library as we have found that constantly updated information means buying a new guidebook for each year/visit.

My reading book was, as mentioned in a previous post, James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack. Superbly written, the prose just flowed off the page and into my head. Poor Gideon, the lonely son of distant and inscrutable parents, destined to follow in their unhappy footsteps until a devastating accident leads to an encounter that irredeemably alters his life. Or does it? The reader is never quite sure whether the book charts a real event or merely Gideon's descent into madness, and this is its utter brilliance: we feel the madness from the inside, what it must be like to think things have happened, only to have other people look at you with disbelieving horror. For what it's worth, I believe that Gideon Mack did spend three days underground with the devil: the evidence of his healed broken leg is incontravertible. Actually, I've just had a thought that the book could be some sort of biblical allegory....I mean, three days underground? Meeting the devil? Come on...! I'm going to have to go and re-read it immediately!

Travel.....and More Books...

Half term looms (again) and the prospect of a few days in Barcelona is prompting me to find a suitable travel book for the journey. And the broken nights/early mornings - I'm suffering from ruptured sleep patterns again and whilst this can be a blessing sometimes (two extra hours of academic reading before the household stirs) it can be a bit of a pain away from home, when you're already pretty stressed-out and exhausted by travelling and unfamiliar surroundings. So, as usual, I'm looking for something not-too difficult, absorbing and well-written. Amidst all the 'serious' stuff that I'm reading at the moment, I picked up a discounted copy of The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson (£1.99), not a writer I've ever come across before. Reviews seem rather encouraging, mainly highlighting the pleasing style and unusual nature of the first-person narrative (not that first-person is unusual, the narrative is...) so that might be the one for the journey. Something for the Husband needs to be bought, and having exhausted the Neil Gaiman corpus, I'm going to have to trawl around Borders or the like, as he most certainly will not have the time to source one himself. The usual online book suppliers are certainly benefitting from my AHRC funding money: only this week I have ordered The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction and A.P.Hartley's What a Word!. This last is a 1930 first edition and I was surprised at the ridiculously cheap price (only a couple of pounds). I am deeply grateful that I can indulge - yes, that's the word - my passion for books, academic or otherwise, and am all too aware that many students are nowhere near as lucky as I have been in securing funding. But neither was I - for many years, and I think I was deeply scarred by husband #1's cold remark (when I asked if I could buy a paperback) that I 'already some had books'. Call this my therapy.

Stops and Starts

Fanning's book Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek arrived and, as usual, I am less than impressed by what the academic press gives you for circa £60. It has one of those glued spines that don't open flat properly and tend to shed their pages after a few goes. I had enough of those during my undergrad days: the overpriced Bristol Classical Texts, with the nasty photocopy quality print.....Still, they have a captive audience, I guess!

The good old Oxfam bookshop turned up a diamond this afternoon: Driver's 1907 Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (7th edition), a mere £3.49 and a handsome volume at that. In fact, strangely enough, there were two practically identical copies of it, the other had a shelf-mark in something like Tippex on the spine but less pencil underlining of the text (I don't mind pencil so I picked the un-Tippexed one). It looks right at home next to Farrar's Life and Works of St Paul (2 vols) and is a testament to the sort of scholarship that we just don't see anymore, a scholarship that lives within its subject and understands it completely. Truly awesome!

I've given up on Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: it was just such a strange mish-mash. I've been reading Magnus Zetterholm's Approaches to Paul, an excellent overview of Pauline scholarship and interesting enough to make a couple of longish train journeys go quite quickly. It touches on subjects that I have a vague understanding of, but fills in the details of how Kasemann differs from Bultmann, and how Bornkamm differs from both etc. etc. And I have read about half of it in one day, so that's a recommendation in itself.

Snake-Eyes Watchin' You

Following my book-buying surge over the last few weeks things are on a bit more of an even keel. I still waiting for Fanning's book to arrive, but my breath is definitely not bated! I'm ploughing through Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes and am finding it by turns interesting and annoying. I think that one of the reviews that I read of it mentioned that it could have done with a damn good editor, and I have to concur. There is a distinct lack of evenness of tone, veering from really quite gripping accounts of life in the jungle to odd and stilted sections of linguistic observation, like he'd just copied out his notebooks. It's neither one thing nor another genre-wise. There is also a breath-taking arrogance at work here: Everett installed himself and his family in the malaria-ridden Amazon without any emergency back-up and when things go wrong he assumes that the native population should just rally to his aid. They do, and the account of the journey with his desperately ill family to the distant missionary hospital is hair-raising and unbelievable. How could he put his family, particularly his children, through this suffering? And how dare he, on his eventual return to life amongst the Piraha people presume to tell them what was right for them? No wonder they wanted him dead on occasion! I may or may not finish the book. Depends if something less irritating comes along.

footnote: the blurb celebrating this book is by Edward Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, MIT 'Everett is the most interesting man I have ever met... a fascinating read' : har har...didn't Everett study at MIT?

Monsters, Grotesques, Crystal, Porter and Fanning

Two recent purchases courtesy of my 'stipend' have been David Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics and Buist Fanning's Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, books that I need rather than want. The former is the sort of book that is regularly useful to all sorts of linguistics students and thus is regularly recalled by the library, or lives in the short loans shelves, neither of which is great when you live over a hundred miles from campus. The latter, a seminal book for my PhD, is conspicuous by its absence - which is strange as they have Stanley Porter's contemporaneous tome on Verbal Aspect. Even though I put in a purchase request at the beginning of my studies (endorsed by my supervisor) they still haven't bought it (or if they have, they haven't got round to registering it and putting it on their shelves yet, which it useless). It's mighty expensive but I can't do without it, I'm afraid, so the bullet had to be bit. I'm just waiting for the uni library to recall Porter's book to make my joy complete. Sometimes - nay, often! - it's a bit of a pain being so far away. The very lovely bookshop on Minstergates (at least 5 storeys of winding stairs, low windows, uneven floors and interesting little rooms crammed full of books) always has a shelf of books outside to tempt the temptible (like me) and it was from there that i picked up very appealing British Library booklet on Grotesques and Monsters in Medieval Manuscripts by Alixe Bovey. Now I know all about blemmyae and sciopods - which is more than you do!