Books Ho!

Books are being acquired at a ridiculous rate, mostly because I am mid-thesis now and living so far from campus, it is often easier to buy a second-hand copy of a book than wait until I go down to uni. The academic books I buy do not really merit much of a mention, other than they are mostly commentaries and books on the background issues of various topics. Oh, and Kittel's ten volume monster Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, a real bargain as it was missing the index volume which I sourced from Abe Books for £12. Bargain! I may be tempted by the parallel volumes for the Old Testament (only three in all) as a Christmas present to myself.

One topic that has captured my interest in recent weeks is that of illness, injury and medecine in the first few centuries AD, so I am trying to get to grips with the works of Galen, the Roman physician. His writings remain largely unattended, save for a massive edition of his works by a guy called Kuhn, who translated much of it from the Greek into Latin. No too much of a problem for a classicist such as myself, although the lexis will need some fathoming to ensure accuracy. Still, it's the sort of task I relish and will keep me absorbed amongst the Christmas debris.

Having read two volumes of Karen Armstrong's autobiography and found much to pity and admire, I have decided that convent life is, after all, not for me. Not that I was qualified for it anyway. Extremely disqualified actually. I've got her book The Case for God lined up for some time in the near future, fairly near the top of my 'to-be-read' pile.

I am currently re-eading Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond, which I picked up second-hand from the local Oxfam bookshop. I read it through the first time and was gripped by her deep learning, which is seldom seen in books today. It's a gentle and humorous (although ultimately sad) book describing her (fictional, I think) journey through Asia Minor, and the author happily ponders on subjects as diverse as the love life of a camel, spying, authorial integrity, death, religion, history and the soul. And none of it comes across as forced. A marvellous book, and probably my book of the year.

I am hoping that I might be given Stephen Fry's autobiography for Christmas. He is another author who wears his learning lightly, which rather annoys many less-educated folk. I just hope it's not too full of show-biz anecdotes. Whatever, it will be suitable fare for Boxing Day, no doubt.

I need to buy a gripping novel for the holiday period, the sort that you really anticipate reading first thing in the morning and last thing at night, but I am a bit uninspired at the moment. I think I need to discover a new (to me) author with a good back catalogue that I can get stuck into.

One of the things I must do over Christmas is to reorganise and dust my bookshelves. The Husband sort of promised to build an extension to the ones in the dining room, but in fact I need to rationalise what I have and possibly part with a few redundant items. I am massively reluctant to do so, but realistically things are starting to look like a mad person's house, where nothing is thrown away and the stairs are taken up with stacks of stuff. But I am not just fond of the books per se, but what they represent, which is a 'finding of myself' in my middle years after years of dithering about, producing children and keeping men happy.

Spiralling Out of Control

Just as I suspected, Jeremy Mercer's book Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes was a bit Meh! (how can a book successfully be both self-deprecating and self-regarding at the same time? Dunno, but it is!) but being in Paris, I read it anyway and enjoyed my pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Co. Would that it could have been a longer visit, but it was not to be, for reasons documented in one of my other blogs parablepsis.

Arriving home, I tucked into the remaining chapters of Crime and Punishment and, having finished, scratched my head as to its overall message. Did Raskolnikov really consider himself to be a man apart, above the law and punishment? Was he testing out this theory when he bludgeoned the old pawnbroker and her sister, or was he intent on digging himself out of debt and providing for his studies so that he could help mankind? Was he just deranged? Sick (he spent a lot of time in delirium)? Laden with moral qualms or totally amoral? He seemed to dance around the possibilities in turn, without settling on an answer, and his decision to hand himself in to the police (when he patently didn't feel guilty and had the opportunity to totally get away with the crime) was bizarre and in the end seemed to have less to do with the flaky transparent Sonya than his own perverse nature. He didn't actually seem sorry he committed murder. Naturally he hated Siberia, and seemed to hate the faithful girl who tagged along with him. Nasty piece of work.
I was in the Oxfam shop the other day and stumbled across the second part of Karen Armstrong's autobiography The Spiral Staircase that documents her difficulty in re-engaging with the world on leaving the convent that she had entered aged just seventeen and the various trials (suspected mental health problems) that she underwent before being finally diagnosed as an epileptic. She is one of my favourite biblical scholars (her work is a model of clarity and interesting insight) and I was vaguely aware that she had been in holy orders, but unaware of the whole story, or what she had been through. It is fascinating, and I recognise much of what she writes about (especially the ordeal of producing a doctoral thesis - the descrition of its failure at viva stage is gut-churning to read) and I have ordered online her Through the Narrow Gate to pad out her past as a nun. I picked up The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley, also from the Oxfam theological book shelf. I've been looking for a copy of this out-of-print book for ages, having heard it nominated as the 'best travel book of all time' and appearing to have a bit in common with Sisters of Sinai, which I read with interest last year. Happily it's just the sort of weather (wet, cold and windy) to snuggle up with a book. Since the Husband and Bright-Eyed Boy are out tonight, I shall do just that!

Sur le Continent

Looking forward to our trip to Paris via the Eurostar: just got fingers crossed that the industrial action against the proposed retirement age doesn't obstruct us too much!
To that end I have bought Jeremy Mercer's Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes set in Paris's legendary Shakespeare & Co. book shop. If I'm honest, I'm not expecting too much from it, just a warm, fuzzy, French sort of ambiance. I don't think it'll last me so I'm taking the Husband's copy of Neither Here nor There: travels in Europeby Bill Bryson, which had me crying with laughter (a rare occurrence) when I read a snippet on parking in Rome. The Husband is just moving on to BB's A Walk in the Wood which is good holiday fare. Daughter #3 has finished The Bell Jar so I got a copy of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle which provides a good contrast with Plath's angsty novel, a real feel-good book. the Bright-Eyed Boy still really hasn't found his comfort-level bookwise. Having tried Darren Shan's Demonata series, he still seems to prefer fact-based books and has made a diversion into Jeremy Clarkson and, most recently, Charlie Booker's Screen Burn. I guess he'll come round to literature-proper in the end - the important thing is to keep on reading.

I've gone a bit crazy on Amazon recently, purchasing a lot of commentaries and scholarly stuff for my studies. Most don't really rate a mention, but one that does - on account of its sheer loveliness is the third edition of Michael Holmes' Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. It's been produced in the style of a Bible, with leather-cloth cover and onion-skin paper and is a quite delightful thing to possess. As luck would have it, it arrived just as I needed to look up Clement of Rome's familiarity with the Corinthian correspondence, so out of the packet and onto the desk.
I'm currently making my way slowly through Crime and Punishment and, although I occasionally skim over a page or so, I'm actually rather enjoying it - if that's the word. It's quite uncompromisingly brutal in places and reveals well the psychological agonies of a sick mind. But what I could really do with is a glossary of characters and names - you lose track eventually as the cast increases in number, and even share patronymics!

The Idiot and a Potentially Evil (Buying) Eye

The close of one of my thesis chapters means the opening of another: another text to pull apart and examine with an eye on the grammatical issues that constitute my PhD. One of the comments that my supervisor made was that I 'didn't seem to use many commentaries'. Well, that's true, because (a) I wanted the ideas that came out of my writing to be mine and not some rewarmed opinions of another and (b) most of the ones I have to hand are quite elderly and (literally) fusty. I am quite pernickety when it comes to commentaries - I have to be, as it MUST nod towards the Greek text. Some are much better than others: the old International Critical Commentary series is superb, and I have been lucky enough to pick up a number of these from my local theological second-hand bookshop (The Barbican Bookshop in York).
They do look rather wonderful and serious on the bookshelf (uniformly dark green with gold titles) and are a tribute to the 'steeped-in-learning scholarship' of the late 19th/early 20th century. I also have Bishop Lightfoot's 19th century commentaries on the Pauline epistles - it's a real pity he didn't complete the set - which are a bedrock of any serious textual work, often referred back to in the ICC books. I've borrowed a few from the uni. library too. I don't have much time for the overtly devotional commentaries whose only intent is to bedazzle the faithful with praising and the party-line (mostly American, evangelical and conservative) without bothering to pick up on the serious historical and critical issues......let's be frank, PROBLEMS, belittering the texts.

Confronted by the need to update my academic wardrobe, er, bookshelf, I bit the bullet and bought the volumes in the New International Commentary on the New Testament that deal with the 'authentic' Pauline epistles. They cost a fair bit, but now my commentary work has been dragged into the late 1990's rather than the 1890's, and in truth, that's what my bursary money is for. They are the product of some serious scholarship and although you do glimpse the occasional flash of devotional petticoat, the detailed attention to the Greek text is exemplary.
Trouble is, I am running out of shelf-space - again! I may have to sell some of my old Classics stuff.

Tackling a new epistle is rather daunting, so I was going to spend a week boning up on the Corinthian background (revisiting some stuff tackled in my final undergrad year), but on reading introductory material to 2 Corinthians, I realise that this is going to be no walk in the park: the Greek text looks like a bag of spanners, like someone has dropped a stack of papers on the way to the Xerox, picked them up and duplicated them without regard for order or coherence.
Oh dear! I've certainly got my work cut out!

The Husband is s-l-o-w-l-y making his way through the latest Bill Bryson (he can't seem to stay awake for more than two pages per night). I've just finished Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney, a fictional account of the relationship between Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) and his 'patrons' the Thrale family, as recounted by the oldest daughter Hester (or Queeney as she is known to differentiate her from her mother). I really enjoyed it and will keep an eye out for more Bainbridges in the charity shops.
I've moved onto Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, partly because Daughter #1 recommended The Idiot to me (although I think she's stopped reading it now for some reason). Serious Russian literature is a bit of a lacuna for me, although I did actually read War and Peace once (meandering and quite dull, I seem to remember) and 'enjoyed' Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I didn't actually get that the former was a satire on Communism). I am quite surprised at how easy C & P is to read - kudos to the translator - but sometimes I find the narrative arc of older literature unsatisfying and I end up scratching my head as to what's supposed to have happened. Or stop caring if it's too digressive. We'll see.

However, the point of this post was that I bought the Bainbridge book as a result of seeing a documentary on her fascinating and eccentric life: she had died just a week or so before. Daughter #1 was very impressed by the job the translator (Alan Myers) had done on The Idiot (I was looking out for a C & P by him), but I found myself reading his obituary in the papers within the same week.
More spookily, I ordered, through AbeBooks, a 2-volume set of Margaret Thrall's ('magisterial') commentary on 2 Corinthians and.......no sooner had I submitted my order than I read on a theological website that she had just died! Perhaps I should lay off buying stuff for a while!

A Miscellany of Books

Hmm....so what exactly have I been reading lately? Well, I finished off Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and enjoyed it very much indeed. I would have said 'immensely', but I thought the latter third was a bit too fragmented to qualify for that. Still, it was good enough that I ordered The Poisonwood Bible from the web for less than charity shop price (£2.76), although I haven't started it yet.
The visit of Pope Benedict to the UK inspired me to buy the biography written by Rupert Shortt - I didn't quite manage to read it in its entirety while he was here (which was my intention) but still managed it pretty swiftly and it was very good - although not quite up to date with the latest events - but it did only cost 1p (plus p&p).
Another book that spans the divide between my academic and personal interests is Diarmaid McCulloch's tome The History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years which is a monster paperback that's going to take some getting through! A small section at a time, I think. Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted was another purchase and although it's interesting, it's not the earth-shattering work I think he thinks it is. At least, not to me with my background in textual criticism.
The Husband, making his way slowly through Bill Bryson's book on small-town America The Lost Continent got a rude awakening when it was recalled by the library for another borrower, having already clocked up a fine, and has had to settle down with another Bryson offering: Neither Here Nor There: A Journey Around Europe which should probably hit the spot.
Daughter #3 having read and enjoyed Long Ago and Essentially True has started on a charity shop edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which was one of my personal teenage favourite reads. Everyone who reads it thinks that they're Esther.
I've also managed to purchase a number of academic books for my studies, the most interesting of which were a very lovely Douay-Rheims/Vulgata Clementina, which looks like a proper Bible and a print to order copy of the Septuagint (the Old Testament in Greek translation), which smells rather pleasantly of fresh ink and a tiny gold-edged, clasp-bound prayer book called The Key of Heaven: A Manual of Prayer for the Use of the Faithful, which has a picture of St Therese of Lisieux (her feast day today!) on the front and a crucifix concealed in a compartment within the front cover. It is very pretty, rather worn, and has obviously been used and loved well. I shall continue to love it and use it too.

The Very Last of Summer

Well, the summer's technically over, the kids are back at school and Monday will see me nose down in my doctoral stuff again. I've had a tremendous time reading purely for pleasure over the 'holidays' and can't say that I'm really relishing a return to the dry prose of academia.
I followed The Elegance of the Hedgehog with Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I thought was a lot better than his Shadow of the Wind. It was a gripping page-turner, somewhat overblown in style (although I'd got into his idiom by then), with aspirations to be far more grand guignol than it actually is. A good summer read.

I then polished off The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and although I thought it was an excellent conceit (narrated by the omniscient and surprisingly compassionate figure of death), I didn't think it was quite as good as I'd been led to believe. The characters were a little too wooden and uninvolving to provoke empathy ,and some (like the foster-mother and Max), didn't quite work for me. I had the sneaking suspicion that the author thought that the situation would be sufficient to arouse compassion and emotion, but the overall effect was strangely distancing. I also couldn't quite decide who it was aimed at (not that that is important in the long run): the older child-reader or adults? The format (bite size chapters, explanations and large-ish font-size) heavily suggested the former, but the scope and ambition seemed to flag up an older audience. Enjoyable enough, but not really thought-provoking or engaging.

My last book of the summer has turned out to be Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which will last me a while, I think. As soon as I opened it up, I realised that the writing in this novel is streets ahead of anything else that I have read recently. It's superbly well-written, which came as a refreshing change (probably because she writes in English and hasn't had to undergo some half-arsed translation process). The story is a slow burner, and none the worse for that - one of the gripes I had with Zafon was, in fact, the ridiculously fast pace at which characters fell in love for life, or situations evolved and were resolved. I am enjoying The Lacuna immensely at the moment, and intend to seek out her earlier work The Poisonwood Bible as and when I finish this one off, which - given my imminent return to study - may be some time!

Shadow of the Hedgehog

The holidays are receding rapidly into the past (sadly) as are the memories of the books I took with me, so I had better make some notes whilst I remember!

I broke off in the middle of Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, there being so few pages left that it wasn't really worth taking away with me. I read some of his collected short stories on the outbound plane - that is, when I could read: the two and three year-olds sitting behind me were totally undisciplined by their parents and spent the entire journey kicking the back of my seat and catching my hair as they grabbed onto the top of it. Not conducive to concentration! I did manage a few stories though, which were a fairly engrossing representation of a particular echelon of society at a particular time in history.

We spent less time just lazing about this year, so I didn't read as much as I did last year, but it didn't take me long to dispatch Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions. It was a warm, fuzzy holiday read, as are all his works, but the new cast of characters aren't sufficiently well-defined in my head to warm to yet. Additionally, there seems to be some overlap between characters in this latest offering and the Isabel Dalhousie series: another older lady caught in an unexpected romance with a beautiful youth? I also kept getting mixed up between the young men in the book....they're all so unbelievably sensitive and in touch with their inner selves!

I started on Dan Simmons' Children of the Night, but the setting was so dark and bleak (post-Ceaucescu Romania) that it was not consonant with the holiday mood and I once more retreated to dip into the brittle world of Waugh.

On my return home I polished off Gilbert Pinfold and moved rapidly on to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, which I'd picked up in a Waterstones' three-for-two offer. It would actually have been the ideal book to take on our city-break last autumn, set as it is in the very city we visited, Barcelona.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I've read a lot of reviews on it since finishing it (to have read them before would have prejudiced me, I feel) and find myself agreeing with most of the views expressed. The characters - particularly the female ones - are thinly padded stereotypes, the protagonist, Daniel, seems colourless and unsympathetic. The character that some reviewers enthused most about (and an equal number hated), Fermin, I found to be a highly irritating caricature of a lecherous cod-philosopher who - if I were Daniel - I'd have dropped quicker than a hot potato. Or punched into unconsciousness and silence. The way Fermin was accepted (and this in the paranoid post-civil war Spain) by the father without murmur or question into the family business was incredible. The 'evil nemesis', the police chief Javier Fumero, was a cartoon villain, who apparently 'giggled'. Indeed, quite often the translation let the book down, with the translator seeming to prefer formal rather than dynamic equivalence, which led to stilted, unbelievable or tortuous phrases. The plotting was confusing, and the lack of colour and differentiation between characters meant that I if my concentration lapsed (as it does if one is tired), I became unsure as to which time-thread I was reading (Daniel/Julian, Penelope/Bea/Nuria).

However, having said all this and despite its faults I actually thoroughly enjoyed the book in the same way that I enjoyed The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, and found myself looking forward to picking it up and reading it at the beginning and end of each day. What better recommendation is there? It had sufficient atmosphere to immerse the reader in the city, and I felt that this was where this book triumphed, rather than in its characters. It is a good, holiday season book, and I am actively looking forward to reading another of Zafon's books, The Angel's Game, which is similarly set in Barca.

After the Shadow of the Wind, I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by the French author Muriel Barbery, whom I'd never heard of until I spotted this. Opinions are sharply divided on this book too, people either loving it or hating it in equal numbers, calling it either profound or pretentious. The conceit, that of an socially and emotionally stunted concierge who hides a sensitive, intellectual side behind a drab exterior is quite intriguing if somewhat unbelievable - who'd really have a TV set playing game shows to fool the residents into thinking that one is really dumb? Would it really be worth the effort to buy bland foods to kid the neighbourhood that one had plebian tastes? The characterisation (mostly of unpleasant or deficient people) is satisfyingly well done. For my liking, Renee surrenders her mask somewhat too easily during the course of the book, but the surprising denouement literally had me in tears reflecting that, at the moment of death, our thoughts must inevitably turn to those who we are leaving behind, and to the second death of those loved ones who are kept alive only in the memory of the dying person. I'm not sure what message the author intends to impart. There seems to be a divide: that a person can only blossom in the company of a like-minded soul (and we get glimpses of Renee's ultimate potential in the company of her friend Manuela), and that beauty can only really be appreciated at the moment of its passing. A bit like life, I suppose.

In Holiday Mode (or Mood)

Well, my addiction to book buying gets no better and in fact is probably getting somewhat worse. You see, I have discovered that it is possible to source second-hand paperbacks from Amazon's subsidiary sellers at ridiculously cheap prices. Starting at 1p (yes, that's £0.01!) plus the statutory £2.75 p&p, that makes a grand total of £2.76 for a paperback. The quality is usually higher than the second-hand ones you get from charity shops (in fact, some are pristine) and c/s prices (depending on where you shop) are quite often higher. Plus serendipity plays a great part in charity shop finds - you get what's there: buying online you can source what you want. I still mine charity shops looking for books, so in fact they don't miss out, because I still buy as many books as ever from them. But the biggest buzz is when the anticipated package comes through the letter-box: I LOVE it!
The Husband was finding the Paul Torday book he was reading a bit of a downer.....poor old Wilberforce obviously has his downhill path mapped out for him, and although he found it a gripping and well-written book, it didn't help the Husband to de-stress at the end of the day, so I picked him up acopy of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (which he hasn't actually started yet...) blurbed as 'the happiest book I have ever read' on the back cover. Should do the trick!
Having finished Dan Simmons Drood (excellent if weird), I am re-reading his Ilium and have purchased Children of the Night online (for the grand total of £2.76). That's a potential holiday book, but when I went out to lunch with my eldest daughter, we swung by Waterstones and I got a bit carried away at the 'three-for-two' counter (Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions). I actually went in for a book of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry - which I found, and is a thing of beauty in itself - so I spent rather more than I intended too. Hey ho! But the McCall Smith will be definitely accompanying me to Greece in the near future, The Bloody Chamber is just a masterpiece and I've been intending to read The Shadow of the Wind for some time (but had failed to find it in a charity shop).

When I had my last supervisory meeting, we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the writings of Evelyn Waugh, particularly his shorter works, and it occurred to me that a collection of his stuff would be an excellent holiday book. As I read in the Guardian recently, a collection of short stories is a sure-fire winner on holiday when the right book is crucial to one's enjoyment (see earlier posts): if one story fails to amuse, another most likely will. Certain that I'd find a copy - if not in a charity shop - then in a second-hand book shop (of which we have an abundance in York) I set off with Daughter #2 and the Bouncing Babba to dig one out. Sadly, it was an unsuccessful hunt, and not even Waterstones had a copy. I did, however, find another volume of short stories the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, (in the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council shop) which contains a wide spread of 20th century authors from Graham Green to Julian Barnes to Beryl Bainbridge. I'm not sure they're all that modern, but the publication date is 1988 (22 years old!). Looks like ideal holiday fodder, but even that did not stop me buying a second-hand copy of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh online when i got home. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold to boot. Ooopsy!

Drood for the Road

Had a couple of days in Milan during the half-term (well, two half-days and one full day, half of which we spent up at Lake Maggiore) which was lovely. I needn't have worried that there wasn't enough to keep us occupied - we definitely intend to return and spend some more time exploring both the city and the nearby Lakes.

In the end I didn't take Wolf Hall with me, the reason being that I came across a book by Dan Simmons called Drood that really took my fancy. I was in Waterstones with the Bright-Eyed Boy who was trying to remember what book it was that he wanted to take away with him (Monster Republic by Ben Horton - he could remember the cover picture only!) when I went for a browse in the 'grown-ups' section. Simmons is better known as a sci-fi writer, not a genre that I am particularly keen on with the exception of his book Ilium which I absolutely loved. I tried to read the sequel Olympos, but..well..meh!...didn't find it that enthralling. But the blurb caught my eye, and a quick riffle through the pages to check out the writing-quality convinced me that THIS was the holiday book to take. It's a good thick book too, so no chance that it'd be devoured before the plane touched down again in England. And it IS very good, dealing with the fraught relationship between the narrator (Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White, The Moonstone int.al.) and a rather manic Charles Dickens. I'm not sure how much is based on real events (was he really involved in a rail disaster? I should Google it I suppose..), but the descriptions of the slums and the opium dens of Victorian London are shudderingly real. The story deals essentially with the disparity between Dickens public persona as jovial paterfamilias and well-loved author, and his self-centred private obsessions including one quest to trace a mysterious figure that he believes has a supernatural hold over him since the train accident. It's quite gripping thus far.

The Husband, suspecting that the Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce describes a depressingly downward trajectory looked well-pleased when I presented him with Lawrence Dallaglio's autobiography It's All in the Blood. The Husband likes to read about excellence in any field - I guess he finds it inspiring - but it really makes him wish he had been able to take part in sport at a top level. So far he has read and thoroughly enjoyed Lance Armstrong and Steve Redgrave's autobiogs. I though they came across as knobs, but as the Husband says, they have to be to get as far as they have.....!

Wolf at the Door

Robertson's A Greek Grammar of the New Testament in the Light of Historical Research arrived from AbeBooks and I am absolutely delighted with it! In my opinion, the Victorian/Edwardian Grammarians/Exegetes still stand head-and-shoulders above their modern equivalents and no amount of clever linguistic shenanigans or novel exegesis will ever replace the awesome scholarship of the likes of Farar, Lightfoot, Swete and their ilk.
Other books for the doctoral studies come in on a regular basis and, to be quite honest, they are pretty dull fare that are easier to buy than wait my turn for at the library. Henceforth, I shan't necessarily mention them by name unless they are particularly interesting. I can always sell them later, I suppose.

I did buy a second-hand Penguin Classics copy of Petronius' Satyricon through Amazon, which I had been intending to do for some time, having read and enjoyed The Golden Ass by Apuleius some time back. In the main I'm not big on Latin literature (finding it pretty turgid fare) but for the Roman 'novel', I make an exception. I may take it with me to Milan. Or I may not. Regular readers will already know that I am extremely picky about what reading matter I take abroad with me, demanding works which are simultaneously well-written, diverting, absorbing, but not too heavy-going. I have identified a new Alexander McCall Smith - Corduroy Mansions (or some such) in Waterstones, but I am actually reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which kept me captivated on my train journey down to uni. for my PhD 'upgrade' panel. She is an excellent writer (although didn't like her Beyond Black much), clever enough to keep me intrigued, but accessible enough for the plot to advance at a satisfying pace. I am simultaneously working through a generic sort of book that gives etymologies of words that have made it into the English language, but only v-e-r-y slowly as after a while one stops caring about individual word histories. The pile of unfinished stuff at the side of the bed grows ever-bigger, but I've stopped feeling quite so guilty about it as I used too. One book I did finish was Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but it doesn't get onto my list of great novels (I seem to be in a minority here). I just felt that amongst the verbosity and meandering digressions was a much leaner, better book, waiting to get out. Sadly, it didn't. And I couldn't have cared less about the main character 'Shadow' either, which didn't help. Daughter #3 was working her way through Marina Lewycka's Short History of Tractors in Ukranian. Having received that author's Two Caravans for her birthday, she immediately started to read that, abandoning SHoTiU! Tut! The youth of today!

May: the (Parcel) Force Be With You!

Well, the books continue to flood in - faster than I can read them, really. Most of them are studies of consciousness and the concept of 'I', but as interesting as I'm finding the whole consciousness studies business, my supervisor has hinted (rather heavily) that I need to forget the interesting digressions and get nailing specifics. At this point I realise how far I've drifted from the core of my thesis and am currently simultaneously panicking and trying to pull myself back on course!
Language, grammar, style....that's the meat in the sandwich, and that's what I'm going to concentrate on! To that end I made my way to the Brotherton Library at my old university. It was a visit that I was really looking forward to. Feeling nostalgic, I caught the train to Leeds, walked up to the uni, stopping en route at the Opposite coffee shop for a large latte and a piece of brazil-nut chocolate brownie, which was every bit as delicious as I remember it to be. I was very cheered to find that my Birmingham approved 'SCONUL' card entitled me to borrowing rights and I wasted no time in getting stuck into the catalogue to pick out a few juicy winners. (Actually, I had to go down into the circular basement and walk around the radial shelves just for the sheer fun of it, breathing in the wonderful smell of OLD BOOKS. OK, so I am a bit weird).
I knew in advance that they had a couple of titles that I needed for my forthcoming seminar paper as I done an online search on COPAC, so I still had two spaces on my card to fill. Rummaging around, I came across a copy of Robertson's 1909 Grammar of the New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, a whopper of a book, but sadly a reference volume only. I resolved to track down a copy of this grammatical behemoth online, and turned my attentions elsewhere. A few hours later saw me trotting happily back down to the station with a bulging and very heavy backpack, which has made my back rather bad in the past couple of days. I loved being back in Leeds and, because I have books to return, I have an excellent excuse to go back soon!

As I have my upgrade panel next week, and have to deliver a seminar paper a week later, in adddition to revising/expanding my current thesis chapter, I've had to be absolutely scrupulous about dividing my day up into work parcels. It's working well thus far, and is staving off subject burnout. I also managed to find, during my lunch-break, through AbeBooks a copy of the Robertson grammar, which should be arriving early next week. Amazon has been working overtime on my behalf too, although I experienced my first book-failure from one of their marketplace subsidiaries. Dunn's Unity and Diversity in the New Testament got lost in the post, and, after a visit to the sorting office and an exchange of emails, I got a full refund with no hassle at all. It didn't really matter as I had sourced a copy down in the Birmingham campus library. Books are piled up on my desk at the moment: I have a prodigious amount of reading to do!

Recreation-wise, I'm still trundling through Neil Gaiman's American Gods when I have the energy to stay awake and read. It's OK, but I'm not exactly gobbling it up. The Husband has just finished his Stardust and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've lined up Paul Torday's The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce (charity shop 80p bargain!) for him next. He's already read Salmon Fishing in Yemen and says he's looking forward to starting on it. I was quite annoyed when the woman in the shop hissed 'Drinks himself to death' as I handed over the cash. Talk about a spoiler! Suppose I'd bought it for me? I kind of bought it as a holiday book, as we've booked a couple of days in Milan, but never mind. I'll get another before we go. Seeing as it was the Husband's birthday, I'd got him a copy of the Eyewitness travel guide to Milan and the Lakes. It all looks very exciting, and he sits up in bed happily planning our itinerary.

My insomnia hasn't been too much of a problem recently, despite a trapped nerve in my neck/back which can wake me up unexpectedly. In fact, my lack of insomnia has been a problem - I haven't been able to do my 5am stint of reading for a few weeks now. Before it 'disappeared', I'd got into the swing of waking up, getting a cup of tea, reading for an hour or so before falling into the most delicious doze complete with lucid dreaming. Excellent! But now I am sleeping right through until 7 o'clock. Shouldn't complain I suppose!

**BTW, why do I get so many Chinese comments? Are they comments, or is it in fact, spam tags? I am deleting them to be on the safe side, as I haven't a clue what they say!***

Secrets and Gods

I notice that posts for this blog have been a bit sparse recently: nonetheless, my book-buying has continued unabated, largely through the medium of Amazon One-Click which ensures that my bank account is regularly depleted, and my book-shelves (or piles) are likewise augmented.

The most interesting book that I have bought recently is Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teaching of All Ages. It is an absolutely fascinating account of religious parallelism, a stunning work to have been published by someone in his late twenties, magisterial and learned in the good old-fashioned sense of the word. I've been reading it slowly over the past month or so: it's certainly a book to be savoured and digested rather than gobbled up. Equally enthralling, although not quite so accessible, is the same author's companion guide Lectures on Ancient Philosophy. It is this volume that really showcases Hall's learning, and I'm having to take it very slowly indeed as the topics are immense in their implications. He seems to be a Neo-Platonist of sorts, which rather accords with my own philosophical sympathies, and I'm reading it very thoroughly indeed.

I can see that Hall might be bracketted with the like of the theosophistic Mme Helena Blatavsky, which would be a pity as his learning was the result of many hours spent in the British Library and Museum, rather than received at the hands of spirit guides, but Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism and Masonic symbolism and themes have been hijacked by the likes of Dan Brown and his ilk recently. Probably one of the most important books I've ever read......and I don't say that lightly. Unfortunately, the reprint of The Secret Teaching is dogged by typographical errors and apparently xeroxed illustrations. What it really needs is a thorough edit and cross-references and bibliography adding. Still, hats off to 'Forgotten Books' for keeping Hall's flame burning!

At the moment my lightwight reading consists of Neil Gaiman's American Gods (one of the Husband's favourite books) which I think I am enjoying, the writing style is not really up my street, but the premise (ancient gods transported to the USA vie with modern gods in the guise of shopping malls etc) and characterisation are decent enough to keep me turning the pages a while yet.

I was quite heartened by the Bright-Eyed Boy's decision to source a new reading book for himself: he got on the computer and read a number of children's horror/thriller reviews before deciding on Gone by Michael Grant. His excitement was palpable at the prospect of a book arriving through the post for him. A chip indeed off the old block!

A Chance Find

The glorious sunshine yesterday propelled me into town yesterday, ostensibly to source a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon for daughter #3, who is finding the endless vampire-fare supplied by the school library beyond a joke. She is mature for her age and has outgrown the standard parallel worlds/fantasy stuff written for her age-group, so I suggested that she might like to move more into adult fiction. She has enjoyed some of Neil Gaiman's work (although, interestingly, didn't much care for The Graveyard Book which was written with a younger audience in mind) and I think will like Sarah Walter's Little Stranger when the husband has finished with it*. It occurred to me that Curious Incident bridges the divide quite nicely and decided that I'd try to source a second-hand one from a charity shop. But, as I found last year with Foucault's Pendulum, although they are on the shelves in abundance when you're just browsing, they seem to absent themselves when being sought exclusively!

I found myself up Micklegate at the Oxfam bookshop (where, at last, there was one indeed) and decided to go a bit further up the hill to Ken Spelman's marvellous book emporium. The open fire glowed in the hearth and I trotted up the rickety stair to the Classics section. They must have had a new delivery of books because the first thing that caught my eye was a 19th century diglot version of the Sybylline Oracles, bound in leather. It was only a little over £10, so I picked it up - and then saw a Loeb edition of Herodian (although only the first volume) and I added that to the pile. Wandering over to the medieval section I found a Penguin Classics copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise....and then one of The Lives of the Saints. As the last two were only £1 each, I felt no jabs on conscience whatsoever, and the Herodian was cheap for a Loeb and would boost my 'collection'. There is something akin to a chemical hit in such serendipity and I couldn't wait to get to a coffee shop and unwrap the books, beautifully packaged as usual, in crisp dark green paper.....

* ....in fact the Dog, obviously bored, finished it (off) before he did. Curling up on the bed she literally devoured the first quarter of the book. Fortunately the Husband had already read beyond the destroyed portion, but its rather tattered and bloodied pages means that he can't whip it out on the train!!!

Springing into Action

I can't believe how long it's been since my last post, but I have been really busy trying (quite successfully) to progress the chapters on my thesis. I shall therefore try to catch up with a pretty condensed account of my recent book buying, which as usual sees a two-way split between the academic and the recreational.

On the academic front, the main purchases have been the Dictionary of Christian Biography (tells you who's who and why they're important: Oxfam bargain), Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Thorleif Boman), Karl Donfried The Romans Debate, Darkness Spoken: the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann (for my German reading Skills course) and a second-hand set of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology [ed. Colin Brown], This last has a bit of a tale to it: I discovered two volumes of it in the Oxfam book shop and thought to myself that they were a real bargain. It was only when I got home that I realised (curses!) that instead of the two volumes covering the entire alphabet, the second volume only went from 'g' to 'pre'. There was a third that I didn't have! Now, I absolutely hate not having complete sets (where there ought to be a set), so that put me in a bit of a quandary....where was the third and last book? Another trip back to the shop another day revealed that the remaining volume hadn't actually been left on the (or, indeed, any) shelf, so I went online and managed to source a copy from AbeBooks, which wasn't so much of a bargain, but meant that I now had the full complement. When it arrived it was very firmly packaged with parcel tape in layers of bubble wrap, paper and a cut up Kelloggs Cornflakes box! It was a bit damp and musty, so it's currently drying slowly in the living room under its companion volumes. I remember what happened to John Chrysostom's Homilies!!!

My recreational reading hasn't been anything like so prolific: I abandoned This Thing of Darkness as a bit too......nautical. Thereafter I struggled to find anything that took my fancy, settling mainly for newspapers and copies of the Times Higher Education magazine. Travels with Herodotus was fairly interesting, but at the same time slightly disappointing. It served to reawaken my interest in The Histories (of which I subsequently re-read a few chapters), and had some wonderful descriptions that caught my fancy (Algiers sounds well worth a visit), but overall it seemed to be very much the twilight writings of an old man (in fact is was his last book). The passages on what were his current postings came across as less real than his interaction with Herodotus, which I suppose was the point of the book: men and situations don't change much over the centuries.

Things really looked up when I availed myself of the buy-one-get-one-free offer in W H Smith and got Sarah Walter's The Little Stranger and A.S.Byatt's The Childrens' Book. I initially started reading the latter, but it seemed a bit cosy and twee (it may improve/get darker as it progresses) and moved onto the former, which proved a terrifically good and gripping psychological thriller. Listed for the Man Booker prize (pipped by Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I believe, which I also want to read), the tension slowly builds and this contrasts with the narrator's steady, prosaic retelling of the events at the ramshackle country estate 'Hundreds'. It was one of those books where, when you get to the end, you think 'hang on a minute' and have to look back to see if what you thought might have happened, did. Sha'n't spoil for you! Go read!!!

Order and Chaos

I've finished off Sean Martin's book on the Templars, and very edifying it was too. I think that I am quite convinced by the theory that the Templars adopted Switzerland as their ordensland and sank thier much-discussed wealth into banks there. It would explain much.
Saturday saw me mooching around Waterstones (RIP Borders) and becoming quite annoyed by their categorization system. The biography section was full of misery-lit which, as many of them are highly questionable if not totally fictitious accounts makes you wonder whether they should be on a shelf of their own. The 'body mind and spirit' section which incorporates 'popular psychology' is filled with complete twaddle including tarot reading sets. I was looking for Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which I failed to find, although some other books of his (The Stuff of Thought and How the Mind Works) were in the popular science section. What I did find, however, was Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, which I seized eagerly as an adjunct to my current studies and, along with Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus, made my foray into the store eventually tolerable.
As this Waterstone's doesn't have an in-store coffee shop, I had to haul my prizes to the new Cafe Nero so that I could have a quick scan of them with a cup of coffee. I used to spend a lot of time in the old Nero when I was doing my OU courses, and in those days it was actually still possible to have a smoke along with your latte. How intellectual I felt with my books and pencils and a Gauloises roll-up to hand! No more though: thanks nanny state! I'm so glad you've determined what's best for me!

The book-buying slump seems to have passed, thank goodness, and I'm currently waiting for a copy of The Romans Debate by Karl P. Donfried to arrive from The Book Depository. This volume consists of a number of essays on Paul's letter to the Romans including the reason for his letter, which is far from settled. On the way back home I popped into our local charity shop and picked up a couple of bargains: The QI Book of General Ignorance (a genre currently much favoured by the Bright-Eyed Boy) and a Templar novel Order in Chaos (ostensibly for my mother), but which turned out to be the third in a trilogy. Guess I'm going to have to find the other two first! Doh!

January Inertia

I am seized by a torpor that even extends to the book-buying department, which means that, as torpor goes, it's a pretty serious seizure,
Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal was thoroughly enlightening an entertaining, especially the amusing analogy used to try and explain Noam Chomsky's shifting views on the innateness of language (as explained to the Emperor of Jupiter), Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes has been duly passed on to Mother, who has found it a welcome distraction during some dark and difficult days and nights. George Steiner's After Babel is sitting on the 'to-be-read' pile, and the bargainous second-hand copy of Wallace Chafe's Meaning and the Structure of Language has a ridiculously stiff cover that means it keeps trying to close itself up when I'm trying to read it. Following on from a recent TV documentary I sent off for a copy of Sean Martin's The Knights Templar, which is a lot more scholarly than I'd expected from his appearance on it (I think it was the big earring that suggested this....). I'm going to try not to get sucked down the whole Templar treasure route, entailing as it does D*n Br*wn and books of That Sort, but it is an intriguing question: when Philip the Fourth of France finally accessed the Templar coffers (having wiped the Order out of existence) and found them empty, where had the money gone? Martin is convinced that the Templars, sensing the end was nigh, had ample opportunity and means to disperse the treasure during the time that the Templar leaders were imprisoned in Paris.
I'm going through one of my periodic reading slumps at the moment , but with Borders gone and Waterstones lacking in browsing appeal (too many celeb biographies or celeb chef cookbooks on display) and not knowing what it is that I fancy reading, I guess I'm going to have to sit slack-jawed in front of the telly a bit more until thoroughly cheesed off with what's on offer. Actually, there was rather a good documentary on last night called Aristotle's Lagoon, which dealt with Aristotle's 'forgotten' natural history masterpiece Historia Animalium. Forgotten? I think not. His understanding of biology informs much of the Aristotelean corpus, and it's one of the first things we studied at uni. It also contains some of the interesting pieces of translation that the Bright-Eyed Boy and I looked at a while ago. The Lesvos scenery was lovely and the presenter charming and enthusiastic, but my main criticism of the whole programme, fascinating as it was, was that it contained no passages from Aristotle's works, and that is a bit of a shame as they are well-observed and occasionally amusing. Aristotle likened a seal to 'lame quadruped'; noted that 'some folk have heard snoring coming out' of a sleeping dolphin's blowhole; that small, round stripey bees are the 'best' sort, with the long bee, the 'thief' bee and the big lazy stingless bee lagging behind; that no living creature 'casts' its back teeth, but dogs lose none at all according to some people and only the canines according to others....Fortunately I'd recorded it, because the lovely scenery, soothing commentary and two glasses of red wine meant that I'd fallen asleep shortly before the end.....

New Year, New Books

The New Year post has brought me a copy of Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal, an introduction to psycholinguistics that is at once highly readable and knowledgeable. It's one of those fascinating books that makes you turn to your spouse as you sit up reading in bed and say 'Well, I never knew that.....', it's full of insights and supplies an excellent overview of the development of the discipline.
A friend of mine has lent me her copy of Harry Thompson's novel This Thing of Darkness, which she rated as her absolutely best read of 2009. It was longlisted for the 2005 Booker prize and sadly the author died only a year later. I've read several reviews of it and they are all equally laudatory, and having started it over the Christmas holidays, it's starting to grow on me. I was initially put off by the '40 years before the mast' detail, which seemed reminiscent of a Patrick O'Brien tale, all poopdecks and marlin spikes, but the quality of the writing is undeniable. I shall persist with it. Boswell's Life of Johnson, although excellent, can tend towards same-iness if read in too large a chunk.
The AHRC funding has happily allowed me to order a couple of books for my studies: George Steiner's After Babel, and another Wallace Chafe book, the Meaning and Structure of Language, both of which I am hoping will provide additional grist for the linguistic doctoral mill. My mother, who has become very interested in the subject of the Crusades, will additionally receive Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, in the interests of maintaining a balanced, scholarly approach.
Hopefully, the severe wintery weather will not delay their delivery by too much