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