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!