more books than sense

Ah! Slight Prob....!

2011-02-07T15:21:00.004Z

Still lovin' the Kindle, although one of its major drawbacks is becoming more apparent: my mother and I share a pretty similar taste in non-fiction, non-academic books which, over the years has led us to swap and enjoy various titles.

Now, of course, I have my portable reading device.

Just the other day I was minded to read Simon Sebag Montefiore's 'biography' of the city of Jerusalem, so within a minute(!) I had downloaded the electronic copy from Amazon.
It's a very enjoyable read, and written in the slightly gossipy style of a gripping historical narrative.
I just know that Mum would love it, but other than pass the Kindle over (which I am not going to do, all my other books are on it too, including my current fiction read, Stephen Fry's The Hippopotamus) I am potentially faced with the prospect of buying a hard copy for her to read. I don't think she'll buy it for herself - my father's a bit careful on the spending front (especially if he isn't likely to benefit, which he won't as he doesn't read - apart from the newspapers).
She may even buy it for me as a birthday present, because obviously I can't really tell her I've already got a digital copy, because that would make me feel mean as she would patently be unable to share it.

I'll probably wait until it comes out as a paperback, then get a copy to pass on to her.

So I'll have bought the book twice over. Curses!
I wonder if there's any facility for linking Kindles and sharing content? Probably not, because that would be open to massive abuse - think book-clubs just downloading one copy to share!
Although she's a bit of a technophobe (whilst aware of technological omnipresence - the parents think the novelty will wear off in a few years), it would be a brilliant step into the digital world, and if she got a 3G version they wouldn't even have to get the internet, a step my father has been resisting with every one of his eighty-four years!

A Kindled Cure

2011-01-10T08:07:00.005Z

Okay.....I have to hold my hands up here and admit I LOVE my Kindle.
The Husband surprised me with one for Christmas. I was initially dubious whether I'd find it that useful, and being a devoted bibliophile was certain that it would never replace the physical attraction of a book but....uh huh....the more I got into it, the more indispensible it became.

A friend of mine, who also got one as a present, agrees that she, too, will probably never buy another work of fiction in hard or paperback format ever again. Relief! No more rootling through the oh-so-tempting three-for-two offers, looking for a third book that, in truth, we don't really want but feel we must buy to get our money's worth. Also, thanks to the brilliant facility of being able to download a sample chapter, no more buying of dud novels, ones which initially appeal but soon get chucked down at the side of the bed.
I've bought single issues of periodicals (not really interested enough in any one publication to suscribe) and am currently trying out a free two-week subscription for the Daily Telegraph. I am quite impressed by this facility - the paper magically appears on the Kindle around 7am and I can catch up on the news without getting out of bed. Plus no excess newsprint cluttering up the recycling bin.

Obviously there are some books that I just can't get hold of in Kindle format - the academic variety - and some are bizarrely expensive. I'm not going to pay over the hardback price for a book that I don't exactly 'have' physically, and I do like my 'library' of real print and paper. Plus academic books have a certain second-hand value. You certainly haven't got that if it's in electronic format! In fact, I'm not really sure what happens if your Kindle goes tits-up.

You can also upload PDFs (the bane of my life) onto it and the highlight/clippings facility means you can accumulate a lot of useful references and store them easily.

It's also very easy to read on a Kindle: I find back-lit computer screens rather hard to read from, but the soothing grey non-illuminated Kindle screen makes it no more tiring than an ordinary paper page.

One of the first books that I downloaded was The Fry Chronicles, the second part of Stephen Fry's autobiography. I had been expecting it from the in-laws, but it never materialised. Being short of a book over the hols, once I got my Kindle I went into a bit of a download frenzy (although much of the stuff I downloaded was free, being out of copyright). It was quite a good read, and having finished it -frustratingly it ends far short of the present day - went onto the Amazon site and downloaded Moab is My Washpot, volume one of Fry's autobiography. I had read it before, but on re-reading realised that I had forgotten much of it.

Other download purchases include Constantine Campbell's Keep Your Greek - not much more than the hastily compiled fruit of a blog (with some stunning editorial oversights - the transpositions of two Greek words and their meanings renders the whole book dubious); an interlinear Greek/English New Testament; the Grosmiths' Diary of a Nobody (free); the Discourses of Epictetus (free) and various samples: Susan Hill's The Little Hand (will probably purchase this after I've finished my current read), Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question (excellent - will definitely get later), Scarlett Thomas's Our Tragic Universe (hmm...dunno about this) and Mrs Fry's Diary (no, definitely not). I'm also dallying with The Spectator and The New Statesman, both of which I never bothered with in paper format (probably due to the price), but are proving to be excellent diversions.

A convert, then.

One of the best actual books I got just before Christmas was The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World by Guido Majno, a comprehensive survey of medecine and therapy across the ancient world from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, India, the Far East and Rome. Intriguing and stomach-turning, it kept me from my Kindle (until the paper turned up at 7) first thing in the morning over the holidays and slotted nicely in with my current side-project on the Roman physician Galen. I also got the only Loeb Classical Edition of Galen's work, a 1916 translation of On the Natural Faculties by A J Brock which I intend to work through, the Cambridge Companion to Galen (very hard going indeed!) and completely unrelated The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (not really started yet).

Funnily enough, I went to an antiquarian bookfair run by the Provincial Book Fairs Association at the Knavesmire on Saturday. I'd missed the previous one due to family commitments (grumpily blogged about in my parablepsis blog) and was determined to attend this one. But in truth, I found it slightly disappointing. True, there were some lovely editions (a three-volume set of Linnaean botany with hand-tinted plates; a Rackham-illustrated Water Babies), but I was underwhelmed by my reaction to the lovingly buffed leather gold-tooled spines, even though some were within my budget. There were also a lot of book 'enthusiasts' there - and though I'm sure they can't all have smelly jumpers or fleeces, stained cord trousers and bottled-bottom glasses, it certainly seemed that way. Maybe I'm just sated with books and book-buying?

Books Ho!

2010-12-15T11:49:00.003Z

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

2010-11-08T14:29:00.006Z

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

2010-10-27T12:48:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-13T15:25:00.006+01:00

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

2010-10-01T15:53:00.010+01:00

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

2010-09-04T15:26:00.005+01:00

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

2010-08-18T10:00:00.006+01:00

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)

2010-07-22T16:01:00.007+01:00

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

2010-06-10T17:21:00.005+01:00

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

2010-05-25T16:40:00.006+01:00

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!

2010-05-07T17:55:00.007+01:00

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

2010-04-12T16:30:00.007+01:00

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

2010-03-02T09:34:00.006Z

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

2010-02-25T16:13:00.005Z

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

2010-01-25T11:35:00.006Z

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

2010-01-18T15:41:00.003Z

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

2010-01-06T20:50:00.007Z

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

Christmas Passed

2009-12-28T19:23:00.003Z

Got NO books for Christmas this year, but fair enough - I didn't ask for any!

My Christmas reading matter tends to be on the light side (to give myself a break, and to be capable of being absorbed after a heavy night) and this year I am progressing nicely through The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart. It is a very pleasant, undemanding frothy confection in the style of Chocolat, passed onto me by Daughter #1 who likes to de-stress on her train journey home from the Inns of Court.

I still haven't had a chance to look at my new Greek-English New Testament, but I am saving that...I have bought a lovely suade book-jacket for it, which smells just wonderful!

Now that the York Borders store has finally closed, there won't be any spending of my Christmas money there (obviously): Waterstones may get a grudging look-in, but I'll probably get most of my stuff online from now on (except novels - I'll try to source them from charity shops or borrow them from the library).

Christmas Joy!

2009-12-21T10:05:00.003Z

Oh joy! The post-woman has just delivered two eagerly awaited volumes from the Book Depository which I am just about to unwrap as you read this: No1, in a jiffy bag (no sniggering now, you North Americans!) is Thought and Language, a revised and enlarged edition of Lev Vygotsky's seminal work that I have decided is utterly necessary to my doctoral studies and , along with Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness will be the touchstones of my thesis. The second (pause to fetch scissors for the altogether more serious cardboard wrapping and shrink-wrap) is a beautiful burgundy Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament with full apparatus criticus! I am running my hands over it appreciatively and feel the urge to kiss it.

Not that I am actually short of Greek New Testaments, you understand, as you might expect for someone in my field. The count up to present include my workhorse NA27 (complete with apparatus criticus, blue, underlined and well-thumbed) that I've had since my undergrad days with Keith Elliott, a UBS 3rd edition with app.crit. and dictionary, a UBS 4th edition Reader's New Testament with gloss, both burgundy too, a small, black Englishman's New Testament (1877, interlinear literal, plus KJV translation around the margins, the font almost too small for my poor old eyes to read), a British and Foreign Bible Society 1931 NT, a 1907 diglot Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and and interlinear with parallel KJV and NIV texts. So I guess you could say that I collect them,but the thrill of opening up a brand new, pristine text is unsurpassable. It's my Christmas present to myself.

The Desert Fathers.....redux

2009-12-15T13:56:00.005Z

OK, as promised, a couple of passages from the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) [Penguin Classics] demonstrating that they definitely took asceticism, self-denial and punishment far too seriously, warping every natural human instinct, behaviour and desire into monstrous and entirely selfish aberrations:

'A brother was leaving the world, and though he gave his goods to the poor he kept some for his own use. He went to Antony, and when Antony knew what he had done, he said, 'If you want to be a monk, go to the village over there, buy some meat, hang it on your naked body and come back here.' The brother went, and dogs and birds tore at his body. He came back to Antony, who asked him if he had done what he was told. He showed him his torn body. Then Antony said, 'Those who renounce the world but want to keep their money are attacked in that same way by demons and torn in pieces.'

'Once one of the hermits lay gravely ill, and was loosing a lot of blood from his bowels. A brother brought him some dried fruit and stewed it, and offered it to him saying, 'Eat; perhaps it will do you good.' The hermit looked at him for a long time, and said, 'I want you to know that I wish God would leave me my sickness for thirty years more.' In his weakness he absolutely refused to take even a little food; so the brother took away what he had brought, and returned to his cell.'

'Once a brother went to visit his sister who was ill in a nunnery. She was someone of great faith. She herself had never agreed to see a man nor did she want to give her brother occasion for coming into the company of women. She commanded him, 'Go away, brother, and pray for me, for by God's grace I shall see you in the kingdom of heaven.''

Insights from the Talmud....and Aristotle.

2009-12-13T15:41:00.006Z

I am thoroughly enjoying dipping into the Penguin Classics The Talmud: A Selection, being constantly amazed and enthralled with the wide-ranging debates and scholarship that can be found this record of Rabbinic discussion on Jewish law, ethics and their interpretation of scripture as a guide to daily life. One particularly wonderful passage from chapter three of the seventh tractate (Nidda) is this:

'Rabbi Simlai expounded: What is a baby like in its mother's womb? He is like a folded notebook, his hands on his two cheeks, his two elbows on his two knees, his two heels on his two buttocks, his head between his knees, his mouth closed and his navel open; he eats what his mother eats and drinks what his mother drinks, but he does not excrete in case it kills his mother. As soon as he emerges into the fresh air, what was closed opens, and what was open, closes, for otherwise he could not survive. While still in the womb a light shines over his head, and he sees from one end of the world to the other, as it is said When his lamp shone over my head, when I walked in the dark by its light (Job 29:3) - do not be surprised at this, for a man sleeps here and in his dreams sees Spain - and these are the best days of a man's life, as it is said O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me (Job 29:2) when there were months not years.'

Apparently during this time the child is taught the whole Torah, but on emerging from the womb into the fresh air 'an angel slaps his mouth and causes him to forget the whole Torah' so for the observant Jew the whole of life is spent trying to regain that former state of blessed knowledge.

There follows an excursus on what it takes to form a whole human being:

'Three partners form a person: the Holy One, blessed be He, his father and his mother. His father produces the white seed out of which are formed bones, sinews, nails, the soft matter of the brain in his head and the white of the eye: his mother produces the red seed out of which are formed skin, flesh and hair, and the dark part of the eye: the Holy One, blessed be He, puts in him spirit and soul and facial appearance and the seeing of the eye and the hearing of the ear, the speech of the mouth, the movement of the legs and discernment and understanding. When his time comes to depart from the world the Holy One, blessed be He, takes his portion and leaves before his mother and father their portion.'

I was particularly struck by recognition of the idea that the foetus is not just the sum of his bodily constituents, but requires additional divine input to make him 'alive'. Aristotle, who also spent a lot of time trying to work out how the foetus was formed, considered that the male contributed the vital heat required to give the soul form (the 'colder' female merely supplied the matter). Indeed, he thought that females were colder, damper, inferior versions of males - but this is the guy who considered that plants were upside-down animals because they had their nutrition-seeking parts down in the earth (unlike animals mouths which tend to be on the upper end of the body) and their generative (seed-bearing) parts waving about in the air (unlike animals who have their generative parts safely tucked away)!

Both the Talmud and Aristotle agree however that the male embryo becomes 'ensouled' at 40 days gestation.....the female embryo somewhat later.

Because they're a bit colder (thought Aristotle) they take somewhat longer to get going, see?

The End of the Line

2009-12-09T16:41:00.005Z

The death-throes of the York branch of the doomed 'Borders' continue. Just as a corpse is stripped by scavengers, the dwindling book-stock is getting shunted ever-closer to the front of the shop, leaving denuded shelves at the now-cavernous/cadaverous rear. Lurid posters and cards proclaim the escalating percentage of discount that can be expected and, sadly and ironically, the shop has never been busier. A game of 'spot-the-book' (see previous post), undertaken from the gallery of the in-store Starbucks is now no longer possible: the bookshelves below are now quite empty. Talking to the staff of that cafe (some of whom have been working there for ages) it would appear that they too are living on borrowed time. When Borders closes its doors for the final time (imminently, it would appear), they will all probably be without jobs, as the neighbouring branches of 'Bucks each have a full complement of staff, particularly as they have been doing some seasonal recruiting. I know a lot of people dislike the globalising and monopolising aspects of Starbucks, but to be quite honest, I much prefer going in one of their branches than a poky little independent cafe that sells indifferently brewed coffee and often less-than-fresh muffins. I know that wherever I find a Starbucks, I can get a decent cup of coffee.
Yes - I get all that about large chains squeezing out the independent trader, but in reality people like to go where the food and coffee is of a consistent quality (and if it isn't, make a fuss and you will get a free replacement and a voucher) and you can sit for hours chatting with friends or working on your laptop without feeling like you've outstayed your welcome. Although nearly all the people of the York Borders In-Store Starbucks are unknown to me by name, their faces and foibles have become familiar over the years. They feel like a community - one that is soon going to disperse. And that feels rather sad.
Where will we all go now for our rest and respite?
And yes, I have taken advantage of the liquidation discount - an Oxford World Classics copy of Boswell's 'Life of Johnson', a droll and mighty tome (as befits its subject) that I probably would not have otherwise purchased, and am currently enjoying as my bedtime reading matter.

Metamorphosis I am Hoping for, not Dereliction.

2009-12-01T19:34:00.010Z

I am rather sad at the demise of Borders bookshops as I have spent a lot of time (and money) browsing their shelves and drinking coffee in the in-store Starbucks of the York branch. It's rather unusual in that the back half of the building was originally a chapel, and the cafe area occupies the gallery that runs around the four walls in a squared-off oval.

Ever since he was very young, the Bright-Eyed Boy and I have spent many a happy hour peering over the handrail and playing our favourite game of 'Book Spotting' with a coffee/bun to hand. This consists of one party naming a book that they can see on the shelves on the floor below, which the other party has to locate and describe. Good for both observation and verbal skills, although we just enjoy it. We went to have a possibly final cup of coffee there today, but sadly found that the coffee-shop was shut for a staff meeting. I hope we manage to fit one more in before the doors shut forever. As a venue, it really does hold many fond memories for me and I hope that the building isn't going to be turned into yet another crappy cheap clothes shop. In truth, I guess I am partly to blame for the chain's demise. Although I have bought a lot of books from them in my time, in many instances the limits of stock, the esoteric nature of my wants, or simply cost, have driven me into the arms of online retailers. Which is where a lot of Borders' clientele have ended up, I suspect.
Mea culpa, Borders.
When I was browsing in town on Saturday, whilst waiting for daughter #3 to do her rowing training (in the boathouse gym, as the river has well and truly burst its banks) I went to a favourite antiquarian book shop, Ken Spelmans on Micklegate. This is absolutely lovely, smells just right (ever so slightly musty), is suitably poky and has an open coal-fire glowing in the back room. Up the rickety stairs there is a modest theology and classics section (always a few Loebs to be had) where I chanced upon a wonderful leather-bound copy of Donnegan's Greek/English Dictionary dating from 1837. I was severely tempted, but as it was a tome of considerable avoir du pois and I had only just started my two-hours' browsing, I regretfully put it back. However, when I thought about it over the rest of the weekend, I developed a terrible hankering for it (small Greek font has a strange effect on me). Monday (a teacher-training day) saw the boy and I legging back up the hill to snatch it gleefully of the shelf. I had previously told myself that it would probably have been bought (to guard against disappointment) but when I saw that it hadn't - well, it was like a real chemical 'hit'. The nice thing about Spelmans is that they wrap your purchases up in green parcel paper, so you feel like Mr Brownlow or some other Dickensian character as you walk out of the shop.
I have to admit to taking advantage of the 20% off sign in Borders and bought Alexander McCall-Smith's The Comfort of Saturdays, a Penguin Classics copy of Selections from the Talmud and an Oxford Classics version of Kafka's short stories. I whipped through the first in no time at all (and for a while found myself thinking in a similar fashion to Isabel Dalhousie: wistfully philosophic) and am dipping in and out of the second. I will read the third in dribs and drabs, as Kafka is far too weird to read a lot of in one go. We've been reading some portions of untranslated Kafka in the German Reading Skills classes and he is a most unsettling author. Nothing is comfortable or predictable. All is alienation and rejection. I remember borrowing Metamorphosis and other stories from the library in response to another (similar) author's work. Damned if I can remember who it was now!

Metaphorically Speaking

2009-11-27T08:59:00.006Z

I have finally finished Janet Soskice Sisters of Sinai and, despite my earlier misgivings about its initial slow pace, I have really enjoyed reading it. The author has managed to blend together an amazing story of perseverence (a solid Presbyterian virtue) with good, scholarly research that reflects the protagonists' own story of learning, delving and discovery. I only wish that I could pass it on to one of my family or friends, but I fear that the fairly esoteric subject, plus its 'slow-burn' start might put most of them off.

I am also making my way through (practically finished!)David J. Williams very excellent Paul's Metaphors: Their Context and Character. This comprehensive thematic survey of Paul's language is appealing at every level, to both the reader of the Bible in English translation (here the NIV, a good workmanlike, if occasionally nervous version) and to those who (like myself) like to wrestle with Paul's Greek mano a mano. In actual fact, it has been a very good way of revising those hapax legomenon - those one-off terms with which Paul peppers his epistles and which I tend not to always recognise immediately. I've also learned a fair bit about subjects otherwise not high on my agenda. Did you know, for example, that a Roman soldier had as much to fear from his fellow legionaries as from his commanding officers or the enemy? If he failed to keep his place in the battle line, or lost his weapons to the enemy he could be condemned to the fustuarium, to be assailed by his comrades wielding rocks and clubs! Indeed, whole units could be subjected to this treatment: after being paraded in disgrace before the whole legion (10 cohorts of between 480 to 600 men = up to 6000 soldiers) every tenth man was chosen to undergo the ordeal (the origin of the word 'decimation'), the brave alongside the downright cowardly could equally be chosen by lot. A similar punishment was meted out for a sentry losing the wax tablet that had the current 'watchword' inscribed on it, or for being away from his post during a spot-inspection (what if nature called?). Harsh. No wonder the discipline of the Roman army was legendary.

The layout of the book is pleasing, although I think I would have probably preferred the specialist language information to have been contained in footnotes rather than endnotes, but that is just because I (personally) find all the flicking back and forth between the pages mildly irritating. I can understand the decision to keep them all en bloc, so that the non-specialist is not overwhelmed with torrents of Greek.

The book is divided into sections that deal with concepts in the same semantic field, which will no doubt please the linguistics afficionados, but some of the metaphors 'bleed' into one another so information in the endnotes occasionally tends to be, if not repeated, referred on to other endnotes. But this is a problem with which I am all too familiar: how to successfully and comprehensively cross-reference without becoming bogged down. The book has a couple of nice and useful appendices- a chronology of the Roman Empire (in outline, rather than exhaustive) and short biographies of the ancient writers that make an appearance in the book, plus the usual bibliography (extensive) and scripture index. There is also an index of the cited ancient authors. Two very minor observations follow.

i) It would have been interesting to see a 'metaphor map' of each epistle to get an idea (at a glance) of the coherence (or indeed scattershot nature) of Paul's thought.

ii) The author skirts around the problem of Pauline 'authenticity' with the old 'what constitutes an author?' chestnut. He says that he has 'accepted the traditional ascriptions of authorship to Paul', and thus includes not only Ephesians, Colossians ansd 2Thessalonians (..well..OK...I can live with that...at a push), but also the Pastoral Epistles. In addition he ransacks the Pauline speeches of Acts for material which he believes contain a kernel of Pauline authority. Mmmm. Why not add Hebrews too, then? I think the trouble with including the whole kit and Pauline caboodle is that we end up examining language that is actually quite far removed from its 'source', and the valid fields of investigation can flow ever outward, until the whole NT is plundered (and then, why not the apocrypha - someone thought that they had authority). Why not maybe 'NT Metaphors: Their Context and Character'? That would indeed be a μεγα βιβλιον! (και ἰσως μεγα κακον!) But if source limitation really is the name of the game, then play on the side of conservatism (not theological conservatism though!) and limit your sources to those upon which the majority of scholars can agree: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1Thessalonians and Philemon. The book would indeed be slimmer, but no worse for that.

That having been said, I am enjoying reading this handsome and appealing volume immensely - so much so that I have put my other current reads on hold for the meantime to concentrate on it. I shall no doubt refer to it in my own research, and shall heartily commend it to my fellow scholars.

Texting Away

2009-11-18T17:21:00.005Z

Sisters of Sinai is still being read, allbeit at rather a slow pace. It improved once the narration fo their expedition got underway, but the most notable event for me was their individual bad-luck at losing their late-found and ideally-suited husbands after only a few years of marriage. That, and how the sisters managed to acquire enough language skills in Syriac to pass muster as serious scholars. But they did, so all credit to them. It must have helped to have no small amount of money to smooth the way though! Some birthday money allowed me to get hold of William Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary, Walter Wilson's Pauline Parallels and a Penguin Classics copy of the poems of Goethe, with German and English text on opposing pages. Lovely - should keep me busy a while. I don't seem to have a 'non-serious' book on the go at the moment: I did get a copy of Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian from a charity shop for £1, but it's just laid on my desk at the moment, unopened. I've also worked my way through Textual Scholarship: an Introduction by David Greetham, and John Harvey's Listening to the Text which examines the rhetoric of Paul's epistles.
The Penguin Classics Desert Fathers book can only be read in very short doses: their utter refusal to engage with life in any sort of normal way is so alien that the mind boggles almost immediately. I shall post the most bizarre example of this when I've finished all the chapters.

The Horror of Reading

2009-11-08T14:38:00.008Z

I can hardly believe it, but the Bright-Eyed Boy is actually starting to show an interest in fiction! And all thanks to Anthony Horowitz. The B-E-B showed a great enthusiasm for reading from an early age, having mastered the alphabet in the Noddy book at the age of three. Not having a great deal of faith in the 'see-and-speak' method of learning to read that was being championed by the nursery class that he was (very reluctantly) attending at that point, I taught him to break words down into sounds to work out what the word said. 'Cuh - A - Tuh' = CAT. I have been vindicated in this as a couple of years ago the school returned to this tried and tested method. Seems obvious to me - how can you read if you can't work out what the words say? Anyway he never had any problem reading as he had the tools to work stuff out himself, but he never showed any interest in reading stories. He is a great consumer of facts: the Guinness Book of Records, dinosaur dictionaries, the Top Gear magazine, Horrid Histories and any number of books like Why is Snot Green or How to Avoid a Wombat's Bottom.

When we undertake a long car journey I like to take an audio-book with us to lessen the tedium: last year it was a collection of Anthony Horowitz horror stories and this year it was The Devil and His Boy, a historically based novel by the same author. We all enjoyed it so much that we had to put the remaining chapter on even after we'd returned home, just to see what happened.

Anyway, I found a paperback copy of Anthony Horowitz Horror 2 in the library and, after I'd read one of the short stories out loud to him (The Man with the Yellow Face - very creepy and set in York!), the B-E-B took it upon himself to read the remaining ones to himself. Having finished it very rapidly we went along to the library and asked the very helpful assistant who wrote in a similar style to Mr Horowitz. She returned a couple of suggestions and a few minutes later we triumphantly emerged carrying a copy of one of Darren Shan's 'Demonata' series. He gobbled it up and as a result, I have just found myself buying no.2 in the series - The Demon Thief. I've promised him that when he's finished that, I'll get no.3...and so on. They seem very grisly and macabre, but I am assured by daughter #3 (all of two years his senior) that 'all boys like that sort of thing'. I admit that I was slightly worried that he'd start having nightmares, being a gentle sort of fellow, but thus far, he seems able to separate fact from fiction. Long may his enthusiasm continue.

In the Desert, Up the Nile, In the Graveyard

2009-11-05T17:11:00.007Z

The Testament of Gideon Mack has been duly passed onto the husband, who whipped through Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book in double-quick time while we were away. I have eventually managed to hold of a copy of The Sisters of Sinai (blogged about some time in early spring) and, to be quite honest, am finding it pretty dull at the moment. The first part of the book is taken up with a lengthy description of the sisters first venture up the Nile and details their tribulations with their hired 'dragoman'. I have found myself caring less and less, and if it doesn't get interesting and onto the nitty-gritty of manuscript discovery p r e t t y soon, I shall stamp my tiny foot in annoyance. The 'stipend' has seen me buy a copy of Charles Puskas Jr's The Letters of Paul: An Introduction, a pretty useful vade mecum for the basic facts on the epistles - always useful - as well as a somewhat less useful (but nontheless appealing) Penguin Classics copy of The Desert Fathers : Sayings of the Early Christian Monks compiled and translated by Benedicta Ward, who is a reader at Oxford, as well as a religious. I must admit that I was attracted as much by the cover as by the subject matter itself - a medieval illustration from the Bedford Book of Hours, depicting a 'hippocentaur' (half man, half horse, but with huge ibex-style horns on its head), a monster that does not seem to make an appearance in the book of medieval grotesques and monsters that I purchased the other week.

The desert fathers were renowned for their simple, solitary and austere lifestyles, their simple faith, lack of scholastic learning and joyful acceptance of life. One of the entries tells the story of the hermit-monk Macarius, who, on discovering a thief loading his few possessions onto a donkey, assisted the burglar to load up the rest saying to himself all the while that he brought nothing into the world, the Lord provided, and now its time to relinquish it all. Hmmm. Not sure I'd be so helpful. Still, the book is going to provide some short but interesting bedtime insights. A few lines is all I can seem to manage at the moment before my eyes shut!

And On the Third Day....

2009-10-31T14:32:00.005Z

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...

2009-10-20T16:42:00.008+01:00

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

2009-10-15T15:42:00.007+01:00

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

2009-10-08T16:10:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-02T17:25:00.009+01:00

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!

Libraries, Books, Philosophy and Paul

2009-09-24T18:40:00.006+01:00

Now that the new academic term has started, I'm going to avail myself not only of my current uni library, but also the ones belonging to my old alma mater. I think I'm correct in thinking that £50 will get me a post-grad library card with borrowing rights. The main library is a circular Art Deco beauty that just breathes learning and knowledge. I used to really enjoy squirrelling around in its subterranean depths, enjoying the smell of the waxed parquet and old books. I intend to get myself over there soon and sign up. It'd be good to open up old channels of communication again with my old department too.
Books have been coming through the letter box at a very satisfying rate, save for yesterday when I was down on campus and one was returned to the post depot from whence I had to retrieve it today. I though I'd better do as there is a postal strike threatening....oh no!
I finished Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosopy Club, and felt curiously vindicated concerning my original judgement of it. Unsatisfying, and definitely not as good as its sequels. Still, it was only £1 from the Autism Charity Shop. I've been reading Michael Gorman's Reading Paul and find it a clear and insightful introduction to the Pauline corpus, although a bit too devotional for my liking. I have read so much about Paul that I have the curious feeling that I actually know him, like he is some sort of tetchy uncle that I haven't seen for a while and who I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way too visit. I think he would be far too much like hard work, picking arguments, generally being pedantic, grumpy, nosy, self-pitying, but the kind of chap that would wordlessly press a twenty-pound note into your hand as you left, noting with surprise that his eyes look moist. I've never quite got over the extraordinary feeling that I got when I was translating 1Corinthians in the autumn dusk a few years ago: I'd got to the last verse, verse 16 and was whizzing through the last section when I became convinced that he was personally addressing me, actually speaking to me through the epistle. Amazing, and not a little spooky. One book that I picked up recently and am keen to crack on with is Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, a missionary - and linguist's tale of life amongst the Amazonian Pirahas tribe. His original intention to 'convert' (what a horrible notion!) them is quickly sidelined as he discovers them to be the happiest of people, with absolutely no need to be 'saved' (I wonder what his superiors made of that!). It was the linguistic side of the book that appealed to me most (naturally) as his discoveries concerning the Piraha's language 'run counter to prevailing linguistic orthodoxy'. John Searle rates it highly, so I'm guessing that it is anti-Chomksyian in its thinking. Don't get me started....transformational grammar v behaviourism.....hmmmm.

A New Term, A New Pile of Books......

2009-09-18T15:36:00.010+01:00

I'm in a bit of a book frenzy at the moment - courtesy of a small unexpected pension lump-sum bonus. It started off respectably enough: a second-hand copy of Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club (which, on first reading a couple of years ago, I had hated enough to leave it behind in the holiday apartment - I had failed to 'get' its subtle observation). It is pure comfort reading, gentle, wryly amusing and deep enough to provide some food for thought. I also bought the husband another Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors), as he'd finished Neverwhere which he enjoyed immensely. Then my fiscal prudence specs slipped somewhat: my response to needing to study is generally to buy more books, as if the mere act of buying them was equivalent to absorbing the knowledge therein (I actually realise that this is not true....). I kind of justified the expense by reasoning that the expenditure was in fact a very small proportion of my forthcoming 'stipend' (what a lovely old-fashioned word!) and that they might contain some insightful nugget that would illuminate my whole PhD. The lists comprises of Coles & Dodd's Reading German (for my upcoming German language-reading course in October), Reading Paul by Michael Gorman, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Re-Reading of Justification in Paul by Douglas Campbell and The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods by Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl. Quite a list to get through. Quite a heap on the bedroom floor! Oh, and a second-hand copy of Your PhD Companion by Dr Stephen Marshall and Dr Nick Green from the Oxfam bookshop, which I read practically all the way through in Starbucks this afternoon.

A Taste of Things to Come?

2009-09-08T13:28:00.005+01:00

Here's a rather worrying thing: Daughter #3 has an accumulation of unwanted books, accrued over the past couple of years of voracious book-reading. They've been to the friends that want to borrow them and, duly returned, are cluttering her bookshelves and bedroom floor. She's largely outgrown that particular genre (magic, mystery, alternative worlds, para-history) and thus is unlikely to read them again. What to do with them? The first thought was to give them to charity, but then I had the idea that the library could probably use them. In the past I've had books that have come up on renewal as 'donations' and I noticed the other day that the library shelves - especially in the childrens' section was a bit sparse. And what better way to recirculate old books? Lots of people could benefit if they were in the system. So I bagged them up and took them to the local branch where I was told that they 'no longer accept donations' as the process of registering them was too difficult. What? Ease of process takes precedence over the acquisition of books? In a library of all things? They'd rather turn down 20 free books (all fairly hefty tomes, in good condition, costing on average £6.99 each new = around £140) than put up with a little inconvenience??!! The world's gone mad! The cart is being put before the horse, surely. I am alarmed for the future and not a little despondent.
The Heart Foundation, however, seemed a little more grateful: they accepted the books with alacrity and a smile. I hope they make a few quid from them.

Oratio Obliqua

2009-09-07T14:48:00.013+01:00

Am scratching about for something interesting to take my fancy. I finished Robin Wasserman's Skinned, and although it was tolerably good, it didn't really live up to the promise of the initial few chapters. The characters' behaviour became increasingly stereotypical, and the excesses of angst betrayed its teen-fiction standing. My twelve-year old daughter liked it, though whether well enough to purchase the upcoming sequel remains to be seen.

Daughter #2, ransacking the Sunday car-boot-sale stalls, happened upon a 2-volume edition of F.W.Farrar's The Life and Work of St Paul (1879), which she bought for a mere £3. I was delighted, as I am a fan of his quasi-whimsical, late-Victorian (but very scholarly and insightful), immensely readable ponderings. It was in fairly good condition, but sadly someone had seen fit to plunder it for its coloured maps. Shame, but the prose is as enthralling as ever, if somewhat fanciful.

'It is clear, from the education provided for Paul by his parents, that they could little indeed have conjectured how absolutely their son would be reduced to depend on a toil so miserable and so unremunerative. But though we see how much he felt the burden of the wretched labour....while he plaited the black, strong-scented goat's hair, he might be soaring in thought to the inmost heaven, or holding high converse with Apollos or Aquila, with Luke or Timothy, on the loftiest themes which can engage the mind of man.'

This week she arrived home with two rather attractive 1895 volumes of Demosthenes Orations - the orators are not really currently my cup of tea, but there's no denying the shabby handsomeness of the books (although, sadly, Volume 1 is missing). The Husband is still engrossed in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: it's lasted him for quite some time, having started it on the outward plane journey of our holiday some 3 weeks ago. For someone who spent many a year NOT reading, he's certainly getting some good stuff under his belt now, although he does tend to get what I borrow/buy for him (I'm his personal book-shopper) so it's not really a balanced reading programme at all. I noted not long ago that the books I choose for him tend to be a bit predictable - all in the same vein: NG's Anansi Boys, American Purgatorio by John Haskell, Dogwalking by Arthur Bradford, You Shall know Our Velocity by Dave Eggars, Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.....all a bit weird and with a hint of sadness/madness. We were both, however, reduced to wonder by the amazing tales in David Eagleman's Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlife.

Perhaps it's time to diversify more....

Holidays and Beyond

2009-09-01T15:59:00.008+01:00

Thoroughly enjoyed my two holiday books (The Unbearable Lightness of Scones and PopCo), managing to polish off the former in just under two days, the latter lasting until half-way through the four-hour flight delay on the return journey. Alexander McCall Smith's latest volume in the 44 Scotland Street series was the familiar comfort-reading that I'd both hoped for and expected. Nothing nasty, with enough amusing insights to raise the odd internal chuckle. Having fairly recently read Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y I had an idea what was in store for me and was not disappointed. PopCo's heroine Alice Butler is far more sympathetic than her angst-ridden self-hating Ariel Manto. The plot is not what you'd call tight, but combined with the various digressions on specialist subjects (maths, cryptography. marketing techniques), it is absorbing enough to keep the pages turning. Characterisation is slight, with many of the supporting roles appearing as mere ciphers (haha! in a book on cryptanalysis! Geddit?) - but that's fine: I wasn't expecting Flaubert. It was fine holiday fare, in the same league as The Gargoyle. Better than The Raw Shark Texts, not as good as Fight Club.

Having finished PopCo before our flight took off I was desperate for something else to read and picked up Robin Wasserman's Skinned, which daughter #3 (12 years old) had completed a few days ago. It was immediately gripping, a tale set in a dystopian future featuring a girl hideously injured in a car accident (shades of The Gargoyle again!). The medical expertise is available (largely courtesy of her parents' vast wealth) to have her essential self 'downloaded' from her broken body into a replica mechanoid, perfect in every way except that it is not 100% lifelike. It will keep her 'alive' indefinitely as long as she follows the care protocols. And this is the interesting bit: is she 'alive'? What does 'alive' mean? What does a person consist of? Are they the sum of their bodies and their minds, or is it the mind alone that counts? We are asked to consider various ethical and moral dilemmas through Lia's angry confrontation with her old life, her friends, her boyfriend and society's reactions. It is very thought provoking stuff, deeply philosophical and gripping. I'm rather impressed.

Actually, I'm procrastinating.......various scholarly tomes are jostling for attention but, hey, I'm still in holiday mood!

Another Useless Doorstop

2009-08-14T09:49:00.004+01:00

Can't do it: read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, I mean. I started it two nights ago and made a final effort at it this morning but it's.....well, I don't like to label....too blokey for my liking. The research seems admirably detailed (although he could be writing absolute mathematical bollocks for all I know) and I can cope with sketchily drawn (tautology?) characters and fast moving plot switching. But do you know what? It's like reading something written by someone with attention-deficit/Asperger's...or for them...syndrome: I'm not sure which. So with no little annoyance, I shall consign it to the 'help-yourself-anyone' shelf along with various other ill-advised purchases. I know what I'm going to get in replacement: Scarlett Thomas's Popco and AlexanderMcCall Smith's The Unbearable Lightness of Scones - pure undemanding beach pabulum, but with pretty coherent narrative strings. As far as I can tell. Thus far.

Finished...in more ways than one

2009-08-12T07:41:00.006+01:00

Woke up early and finished off Force of Circumstance - more because I wanted to put it out of its misery than through any desire for completion. The ending is so bleak and downbeat that I really must read something light and fluffy to counteract the sour and gloomy atmosphere that is lingering around me this morning (Alexander McCall Smith is good for that...The Unbearable Lightness of Scones maybe?). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that she had some sort of mid-life crisis (hackneyed concept though it is) that caused her to lose her enthusiasm for life, her insatiable desire for travel and experience, even for her writing, which latterly became a chore done with grim determination. She sensed the life draining out of her, hated the withering of her body, dreaded the separations inevitably wrought by death.
Well, we all do, love! But her reaction was to 'batten down the hatches', withdraw from society (save for a few intimates) and things that previously gave pleasure, and settle into a grimly monastic existence guaranteed to make her old age seem even longer and less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. She lived a very selfish life, did exactly what she pleased when she pleased, and in the end this self-sufficiency allowed her to pull her lonely cloak around herself with very little opposition. At the end of this book she laments that all her experiences, reading and knowledge 'made no honey....provide no-one with any nourishment' and bitterly regrets that her annihilation will terminate her repository of memories:

'If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to....what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place, I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.' (Force of Circumstance 'Epilogue')

Perhaps this is one of the best arguments against voluntary childlessness that I have ever read (although she never once even mentioned that she might have considered children, having had a horror of restriction and duty. Imagine a little Sartre/de Beauvoir!). The legacy of such emotional independence can turn out to be a terrible loneliness at an age when we are least capable of sustaining it.
I've still got All Said and Done (the fourth volume of her autobiography) to re-read. As I remember, this consists of a series of essays on important themes in her life - far more measured and reflective than Force of Circumstance's anguished threnody. I think, however, that I have had enough of Mme de Beauvoir for the time being. Maybe in the autumn I will turn to her again.

Thar She blows!!!!

2009-08-11T15:03:00.006+01:00

Simone de Beauvoir is officially depressing me now. Whatever happened to the intellectually curious and sociable young woman of her younger books? The attitude that prevails in the last quarter of Force of Circumstance is that of a jaded appetite for life and a constant bewailing of the descent into the tomb. And she's only in her fifties.....not significantly older than myself. I guess she must have burned herself out. I am forcing myself to complete it, but am finding her gloomy introspection having a negative effect on me and can't wait to get it over and done with. I might have to go and reread some of her earlier stuff, when she was at the Sorbonne and started to knock around with J-PS in the Flore cafe to jolly myself up! Having said all that, her reflections on life often hit the mark: perhaps that's why I'm finding it such hard going - she's relating the unpalatable truth about ageing and loss of vitality. I sha'n't lend it to my mother, who dwells quite a lot on the implications of loss, old age and death.
It occurred to me that I am woefully under-read when it comes to classic novels, so in a futile and belated attempt to remedy this shortcoming I've bought Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Shallowly enough, I was prompted to do this by the recent rescreening of an episode of my favourite cartoon series Futurama, The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, where the earth is invaded by giant disembodied brains which attempt to wipe out all thought processes in the universe. It's too complicated to relate in detail, but a battle ensues where the plots of classic novels are employed to trap, in turn, the Chief Giant Brain and the unfortunate Fry and Leela. The Chief Giant Brain utilises the plot of Moby Dick, crowing triumphantly 'You shall remain trapped forever in this dense symbolist tome!' They don't, because Captain Ahab (who identifies the chief GB as 'the great grey thinky whale') and Queeqeg and (don't ask) Tom Sawyer help them to escape into the plot of Pride and Prejudice (again, don't ask!). Soon after, in desperation Fry writes his own appallingly spelt novel whose lack of logic causes the Chief GB to have a mental breakdown and 'leave earth for no good raisin'. Hilarious stuff.
Anyway, I invested in a 'Wordsworth Classic' version whose merits I have sung before (cheap, and with an excellent introduction and notes). Complementary to this, I also picked up Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare which is shortlisted for the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. This should add vital background.

I was a young but ardent whale conservationist in the seventies, for many years sporting the ubiquitous 'Save the Whale' badge on a succession of shoulder bags (it didn't get any less theoretical than that, I'm afraid), and I was quite transfixed by a recent visit to the whale exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. So I shall enjoy a voyage of the imagination onto the high seas: and doesn't it have one of the most thrilling opening lines of any novel? I don't know quite why, but 'Call me Ishmael...' sends a thrill of anticipation and excitement down my spine.....

Cryptono...no...no!

2009-08-07T08:42:00.001+01:00

Still extremely dubious about Cryptonomicon. I read the prologue this morning and felt even more sceptical. I probably need a back up.

A Writer's Life

2009-08-06T12:52:00.003+01:00

I am plodding on with Force of Circumstance and find that it is improving. Actually, to tell the truth, I am skipping the overtly political bits and concentrating on the author's reflection on her motivations, relationships, writing and travels. For a forceful and intellectual woman, she seems unduly troubled by the ageing process. Her relationship with the writer Nelson Algren having petered out (both too pig-headed to compromise), she mournfully resigned herself to a celibate decline. She had not even reached fifty, for crying out loud! An unexpected affair with the journo Claude Lanzmann restored her confidence and joie-de-vivre, particularly as he was 17 years her junior. She writes much more engagingly when living life to the full and it is not difficult to detect the grey cloud of depression that shrouds her when she feels lonely and disconnected. Misery chokes articulacy.

She describes the writing process extremely accurately, and it is heartening to know that even such a towering intellect as hers struggled to put pen to paper:

'When I feel ready [after much reading and reflection], I write three or four hundred pages straight off. This is arduous work: it requires intense concentration, and the rubbish that accumulates appalls me. At the end of a month or two, I am so sickened that I can't continue. I begin again from scratch. despite all the material I have at my disposal the paper is blank once more, and I hesitate before taking the plunge. Usually I begin badly, out of impatience; I want to say everything at once; my narrative is lumpy, chaotic and lifeless. Gradually I become resigned to taking my time. then comes the moment when I find the distance, the tone and the rhythm I feel are right; then I really get underway. With the help of my rough draft, I sketch the broad outlines of a chapter. I begin again at page one, read it through and rewrite it sentence by sentence; then I correct each sentence so that it will fit into the page as a whole, then each page so that it has aplace in the whole chapter; later on, each chapter, each page, each sentence is revised in relation to the work as a whole. Painters, Baudelaire says, progress from first sketch to finished work by painting the complete picture at each stage; that is what I try to do.'

Force of Circumstance: Part I, ch.5 'Interlude'

Inspiring stuff indeed.

Like Father(s)? Like Sun!

2009-08-04T18:43:00.004+01:00

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: that's my holiday book, but I have to admit I'm feeling a bit dubious about it......seems to tick the right boxes, but I am uncomfortably aware that so did the Illuminatus! trilogy.....I did try to read some of Stephenson's Baroque trilogy once upon a time but faltered quite quickly. I'll give this one a go.

Two biblioblogger recommendations are winging their (used) way to me:

1) New Testament Studies by C H Dodd, as recommended by Mark Goodacre as essential reading for anyone who is 'seriously interested' in Pauline eschatology (me! I am!) and

2) John J. O'Keefe & R.R. Reno's 'Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible' [recommended in 'Son of the Fathers' blog, by - if I'm not mistaken - Josh Mc Manaway (sp?)] dealing with patristic hermeneutics, very pertinent to my area of study.

I don't think I'll be taking them away on holiday with me: I'm far too shallow and flakey. No pics of me boning up on my PhD stuff on the beach....or maybe.....?

HT Mark Goodacre's NT Blog , Son of the Fathers

Force of Habit

2009-07-29T10:01:00.005+01:00

I've been reading Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance and, to tell the truth, I'm finding this volume of her autobiography slightly dull. Starting at the end of the war, it concentrates on the period of her literary heyday, her strange relationship with Sartre and her many political and social connections. And I think this last is the main problem: I've never heard of most of them, but she takes it as given that these faceless names mean something to the reader. There's also a lack of personal reflection (at least as far as I've read) that made the previous two volumes interesting. I don't care who she knew - I want to know what she thought. As it is, it reads a bit like a meeting schedule. It may improve, but it had better do so pretty damn soon!

I've also been trying to bone up on the basics of linguistics, and to that end purchased a Hodder 'Teach Yourself' linguistics book. It is utterly fascinating -no, it's better than that. If I was going to do another degree, this is the subject that I'd study. The book is by Jean Aitchison, although I didn't realise this until just now, when I looked for the author's name (not very prominent). This is the linguist recommended to me by my doctoral supervisor as being clear and accessible - and I have to agree. It's rivetting stuff.

Before long I'm going to have to sort out a 'holiday book' again. As I'm anticipating doing a lot of wine-soaked lazing about in the sun, I want something not too heavy, amusing but well written with enough pages to keep me going throughout the whole week. If I get the selection wrong, I stamp my tiny foot, pout and sulk, so I had better start looking soon! I must also get over the temptation to take anything scholarly with me: I'm pretty good at pretending to read the heavy stuff, i.e. moving my eyes over the page at a convincing rate, but actually thinking about something entirely different (and usually banale). Usually food.

Being and Time and....Nothing(ness)!

2009-07-21T21:17:00.007+01:00

I've just finished - and thoroughly enjoyed - The Prime of Life and hope to start on Force of Circumstance later this evening. De Beauvoir writes vividly of occupied Paris and the efforts that she and her comrades made to make their lives tolerable, if not enjoyable during the most oppressive times and her enjoyment of cafe life is something with which I can identify most enthusiastically! I could have kicked myself for my procrastination the other day: whilst browsing in the Oxfam bookshop I found a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time for £4.99 and a commentary on it for a further £3.99. I hummed and ha'd about buying it (he's a bit earlier than my usual existential interests, although seminal) and eventually put it back on the shelf. Sometime during the ensuing hours, I conceived a real desire to buy it, so having delivered daughter no.3 to her rowing practice the following day, I scuttled back to the shop to purchase it. Only someone else had bought it in the interim. Dammit! I am so annoyed! I wonder if it was the same freak that bought the Gothic grammar a few months back? Do I have a doppelganger? I think, dear reader, that I do!

Force Majeure

2009-07-09T15:56:00.007+01:00

A 'pre-owned' copy of Force of Circumstance - the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography - arrived today (a genuine 70's Penguin, but sadly without a Matisse blue-figure cover illustration). I was severely tempted to start reading it at once, but as I am approximately one third of the way through a long-intended re-read of her Prime of Life (volume 2), I restrained myself. I am throroughly enjoying the latter, especially as the last book I read on de Beauvoir was Deirdre Bair's less than flattering biography of her. There is no doubt that de Beauvoir glossed over much of her past, particularly her manipulative relationships with her pupils and her over-dependency on the good opinion of the toad-like Sartre. Still, I find her apparent ability to both enjoy and analyse her experiences (the ones she lets us in on) most captivating.
It came to mind that I had bought my first copy of her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter whilst staying with my aunt and uncle in Devon. I'd been sent down there to give my long-suffering parents a break from my teenage stubborness and rebellion. I clearly remember the sense of freedom I felt as my (very tolerant) relatives let me do more-or-less as I wanted or gently steered me to places like Buckfast Abbey and Exeter. I think I'd taken to wearing some bizarre floor-length outfits and affected a world weary air of langour. O how bohemian I felt! Suffice to say I was not improved by my sojourn and returned just as insufferable - if not distinctly worse - having found a similarly headstrong role-model and a taste for Disque Bleu!

Philosophy and Theology

2009-07-07T14:36:00.005+01:00

Am thoroughly enjoying a re-read of Simone de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life in preparation for the arrival of her Force of Circumstance (due to plop through the letterbox any day soon). Takes me back a bit and fills me with regret that I didn't actually manage to have a coffee in 'Les Deux Magots' when last in Paris (the troops were on the verge of mutiny). An impulse buy recently was a Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St Paul (eds. Wayne Meeks & John Fitzgerald), sourced from the internet at an amazing £8.98 (inc. p&p)! There's nearly 700 hundred pages of scholarship and reception ranging from Irenaeus to Luther to Nietzsche to Barth. Plus a comprehensive bibliography. Fantastic value......that's my 'serious' book for the summer. I did see it recommended on someone's blog, but can't for the life of me think where. Apologies - will post an acknowledgement if I re-find it*.

It was in Theophrastus' blog What I Learned from Aristotle
link:http://whatilearnedfromaristotle.blogspot.com/search?q=the+writings+of+st+paul

Force of Circumstance

2009-07-01T15:56:00.003+01:00

One of the things that I regret on a regular basis is getting rid of books. Sometimes this has been forced upon me by the break up of circumstances (it's usually better to run for your life than ponder what books to take with you) or by the occasional misplaced desire to declutter, streamline, minimise, whatever. I think I'm a bit wiser now.....I never get rid of books entirely, the extended personal loan is a favourite strategy of mine. Some long-gone books continue to haunt me by their absence: a well-thumbed childhood copy of The Wind in the Willows, a lavishly illustrated volume of Tutankhamun's treasure, a Penguin set of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography with matching Matisse blue figure covers. I managed to replace three of the latter (two sadly with different cover photos). Why did I ever get rid of them in the first place? A university friend of mine did much the same thing, dumping all her medieval literature after the end of her course, only to bitterly regret it later. I guess some books need time and distance to truly appreciate them. Anyway, I intend eventually to replace the non-Matisse ones, thus recreating my teenage reading experience. I have however, just ordered the third volume 'Force of Circumstance' from an Amazon subsidiary - for 44p! Funnily enough, I'm not entirely sure that I ever possessed this one in the first place, which seems a bit of an omission...but I can't recall anything about her in the mid-forties to mid-fifties. Oh well....we'll see....

Life, and What Comes After It.

2009-07-01T11:02:00.008+01:00

David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife duly arrived and I have been reading the odd one or two at bedtime every night. They are exquisite gems of writing, Borgesian - yes - but also remind me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, although Eagleman's prose is leaner, more haiku-like. They are ingenious too, with breath-taking ideas wrapped in both wit and poignancy. Actually , I have had to hold myself back....it would be very easy to indiscriminately bolt through them in one go and fail to savour their subtle individual flavours, which would do the tales a grave disservice.

I've also just read the latest in Diana Athill's biography Somewhere Near the End. It is a slim volume and I managed to read it piecemeal in about a day. Her writing is, as one would expect from a literary grande dame, elegant and precise. Cool, even cold on occasion. I'm not sure whether she has deliberately taken the decision not to reveal her emotions concerning what would be counted by most as life-changing /traumatic events, or if she is very much of the 'stiff-upper-lip-mustn't-grumble brigade' (very possible, given her age), or if she is just completely lacking in empathy and compassion except in the most perfunctory way. I don't get the impression that she particularly cared about her family, friends or companions except in wishing to be seen to do approximately the right thing. As for the families of the married men that she had affairs with....there seems to have been an absolute absence of comprehension or interest in anything other than her own gratification and amusement. It's a pity, because I hoped that this would be a warmer book, filled with wisdom and insight garnered over 9 decades, rather than an apparently chilly dismissal of people and opinions other than her own. In a strange way, I found it reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical writings, which I have enjoyed immensely since I first read her at the tender and impressionable age of seventeen. She was certainly a cold and calculating fish, but possessed of an intellectual vigour (and rigour) that is missing in Athill. I must start reading de Beauvoir again soon.

Mmmmmm.....New Greek Lexicon....

2009-06-25T21:11:00.003+01:00

Blimey! Returned the university library copy of the Patristic Greek Lexicon to them by post today......as it weighs nearly 3kg it was NOT cheap, not even sending it by Parcelforce 48hr. Still, it's cheaper than the train fare to the midlands. By an elegant coincidence, just as I was about to leave for the post office, the DHL van arrived to deliver MY OWN COPY OF IT!!!!! Yes - I bit the very expensive bullet, courtesy of my anticipated funding, and now have a Lampe of my own to illuminate my reading. Mmmm...brand new book with crisp clean pages......mmmm.......small Greek text......mmmm!

Egypt Calls

2009-06-23T16:17:00.009+01:00

The library's recall of Lampe's Patristic Lexicon has left me in a bit of an expensive quandary: to buy my own copy or not? It's vastly expensive, but I could spend pounds and pounds if I indulge in constantly recalling it myself for redelivery. Would that there was an online version! If I don't eat for a month or two......

I've been reading, in a very desultory fashion, C.J.Sansom's Revelation......and to be honest I'm not really getting into it. Maybe it's the 'historical mystery' genre ('Morse in hose', as the hero has been dubbed) - not really my thing although I really enjoyed The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - but I think that I'm not really enjoying the way that it's written....it seems almost too straightforward and clear, almost as if it were written for teenagers. Writing by numbers, if you like. I probably won't persist as I picked up a copy of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and, having read the first few pages the quality of the prose just hit me between the eyes. Fantastic! The languourousness of humid Alexandria reminds me (unsurprisingly) of Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy which are among my absolute favourite books. It makes me want to read the poems of Constantine Cavafy again.I hope I'll be eventually able to source a charity shop copy of my own. Still waiting for Sum to arrive, but when it does, I can slot the separate tales between the Durrell chapters.

An Old Man: by Constantine Cavafy.

At the noisy end of the cafe,

head bent over the table, an old man sits alone,

a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old age

he thinks how little he enjoyed the years

when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he's aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.

Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.

So brief an interval, so brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,

how he always believed - what madness -

that cheat who said: "Tomorrow. You have plenty of time."

He remembers impulses bridled, the joy he sacrificed.

Every chance he lost

now mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much remembering

makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,

his head resting on the cafe table.

Night Train to the Afterlife

2009-06-18T12:56:00.006+01:00

My bed-time reading recently has been Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon. I bought it on the strength that it was very cheap when bought with the Times newspaper (£1.99 or £2.99....I can't remember) and had a glowing recommendation from Isabel Allende on the cover (' A treat for the mind' or somesuch, I can't be bothered to go upstairs and look). I've been reading it for ages and ages, a small morsel at a time. It's one of those slow burners that, even after finishing it, I'm not quite sure whether I enjoyed it or not, although when I'd finally closed the cover, I knew I'd miss it. Looking at the reader reviews on Amazon it seems that opinions on it vary widely: some people hated it, thought it was dull, stodgy, had a boring hero, that nothing happens etc., but some people gave it five stars and loved it for its glacial pace and introspection. Many commented on the poor translation from the original, but it was not something that troubled me too much. I think the whole message of the novel is that life is all about the journey, not the end destination. Poor little, boring, troubled 'Mundus' was like a worm wriggling miserably on the hook of its existence: the brief intrusion on his life by the (suicidal?) Portuguese woman coupled with the discovery of the luminous and mysterious Prado's book at the bookseller's had the effect of opening up a world of possibilities and other lives that, having had a glimpse of it, he could not bear to step away from. But he is subject to the 'Bell Jar' effect (see Sylvia Plath's book of the same name): We humans cannot escape ourselves by changing location: we carry our stale lives' atmosphere around with us, our fears, hang-ups, paranoias, shyness, whatever. They taint the freshness of wherever we go, so that it is no longer the place we originally and fondly perceived it to be.
Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice of the week, David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, reviewed in the Guardian newspaper last Saturday certainly struck a few chords with me and slotted right into my current interest in, and studies of, the hereafter. Eagleman seems an intriguing prospect as an author- a neuroscientist who writes in a style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges (whose work I just loved and devoured last year). The premise is '40 different versions of our post-life existence.....skits on the conundrums of creation itself...God, variously imagined as male, female, non-existent or concerned only with microbes...is, as often as not, in despair at how imperfect everything is, how the best intentions can go wrong...These are stories that tell us how to live our life now, to appreciate, indeed treasure, our sublunar existence...'

(never mind skipping off on pointless and unneccessary quests, touting our pack of misery with us). Needless to say, I have ordered it.
Given that there are forty separate morsels, I intend to read it over the space of forty days...a biblical concept if ever there was one

The Comfort of Job

2009-06-10T14:18:00.006+01:00

Can't resist an ICC commentary! Picked up a 1921 copy of 'A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job' by Samuel Rolles Driver and George Buchanan Grey from the Barbican Bookshop. It's in pretty good condition, a bit faded and musty, but most of the pages are still uncut along the top edge, so I'm guessing that it hasn't had much use unless the previous owners were content to peer into the pages! I'm particularly keen on examining the language of Job's hope for post-death vindication, but that'll have to wait a wee while until I've incorporated some of Albert Schweizer's ideas (from The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle) into my study of Pauline eschatology. It's an amazing book: I can't quite understand why the university have relegated to the storeroom. However, I'm going to have to read Kasemann on Schweizer. No doubt I'll find all my current ideas turned upside-down!

Daniel and Decisions

2009-06-05T10:13:00.004+01:00

Studying the Book of Enoch has lead me onto the Book of Daniel. The ever-brilliant Barbican Bookshop has a large selection of International Critical Commentaries at the moment (some in considerably better condition than others!) including a pristine commentary by James Montgomery on Daniel. Not the most modern commentary on the market, but very useful as it contains a great deal of textual detail. The wonderful news that I am to receive funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for my doctoral studies means that a whole new world of book-buying will open up for me come October. I scarcely know where to start: One biggie that I surely want is the IVP Dictionary of New Testament Backgrounds edited by Stanley Porter, another possibly my own copy of Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon. Decisions, decisions.....

Too Hot to Blog

2009-06-01T16:23:00.002+01:00

This is why the continentals are so laid back.......the glorious sunshine and high (for us)temperatures disincline computer use. And the lap-top screen can't be seen very well outside, so blogging will be kept to a minimum for the duration. Suffice to say that I have sourced a 1917 translation of The Book of Enoch (Ethiopic), which I have been reading in the shade of the vine-covered pergola. It's lovely and mesmeric stuff, full of arresting imagery, that meanders through the heavens and the underworld as Enoch reveals his visions:

'And I proceeded and saw a place which burns day and night, where there are seven mountains of magnificent stones, three towards the east, and three towards the south. And as for those towards the east, one was of coloured stone, and one of pearl, and one of jacinth, and those towards the south of red stone.
But the middle one reached to heaven like the throne of God, of alabaster, and the summit of the throne was of sapphire. And I saw a flaming fire. And beyond these mountains Is a region the end of the great earth: there the heavens were completed. And I saw a deep abyss, with columns of heavenly fire, and among them I saw columns of fire fall, which were beyond measure alike towards the height and towards the depth. And beyond that abyss I saw a place which had no firmament of the heaven above, and no firmly founded earth beneath it: there was no water upon it, and no birds, but it was a waste and horrible place. I saw there seven stars like great burning mountains, and to me, when I inquired regarding them, The angel said: 'This place is the end of heaven and earth: this has become a prison for the stars and the host of heaven. And the stars which roll over the fire are they which have transgressed the commandment of the Lord in the beginning of their rising, because they did not come forth at their appointed times. And He was wroth with them, and bound them till the time when their guilt should be consummated (even) for ten thousand years.'

The Book of Enoch is seminal in that it is from here that the designation 'Son of Man' (as seen in the Matthaean Gospel) comes.

'And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats,[and the strong from their thrones] and shall loosen the reins of the strong, and break the teeth of the sinners. [And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms] b ecause they do not extol and praise Him, nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them. And he shall put down the countenance of the strong, and shall fill them with shame. And darkness shall be their dwelling, and worms shall be their bed, and they shall have no hope of rising from their beds, because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits.'

As I am tracing the concept of the underworld and resurrection at the moment, this is all fantastic stuff and this text is referred to constantly in the Schweizer book (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle) that constitutes my current reading first thing in the morning. But my favourite verses are the ones that refer to the dwelling-place of Wisdom ( as usual, a female personification):

'Wisdom found no place where she might dwell; Then a dwelling-place was assigned her in the heavens.
Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, and found no dwelling-place:
Wisdom returned to her place, and took her seat among the angels.
And unrighteousness went forth from her chambers: Whom she sought not she found, and dwelt with them,
As rain in a desert and dew on a thirsty land.'

Fantastic!

A Lampe to Read By

2009-05-27T09:51:00.003+01:00

The courier has just brought me G W H Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the uni. library. How exciting! It's actually not as old as I'd imagined it to be: I thought Lampe was some bewhiskered Victorian clergyman-scholar, but in fact the publication date is 1961. Being an OUP publication, it's very much like my large Liddell-Scott-Jones in format (not quite so bulky though), but of course specialises in theological and ecclesiastical vocabulary, so I don't have to wade through all the classical forms and definitions first. I can't wait to get started!

The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle

2009-05-26T16:26:00.004+01:00

Albert Schweizer's The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Uncanny. I was looking for this in the uni library catalogue a couple of weeks ago and found that it had been relegated to the card indices and stores. And there it was today, up the winding stairs of the Minster Gates Bookshop (the bookshop that I'd most like to own because of its location adjacent the Minster). At £10, it has actually broken the bank, but I couldn't not buy it, could I? Call it serendipity, karma, whatever...

The Valley of Dry Bones

2009-05-26T10:17:00.010+01:00

Currently occupied in tracing the development of the afterlife in Judaism, I find myself engaged with Ezekiel's 'Valley of Dry Bones'. Whereas She'ol is had generally been understood as beyond the dominion of YHWH, in chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel describes God's power through prophesy to clothe the dead bones and restore breath to the bodies. I need to look thoroughly at the language used in the Septuagint. I knew that the good old Barbican Bookshop had a rather elderly copy of an ICC Ezekiel, so I called in to see whether it was still on their shelves. It was, so I bought it. It's vintage stuff: first published in 1936 (although I have the 1960 reprint), Cooke's commentary 'keeps the Hebraist in view' and each section is most usefully followed with a page or two of detailed textual notes, including readings from the LXX. Marvellous stuff. Whilst there I happened to see another ICC volume: Abbott's 1897 (although mine must be a reprint) commentary on Ephesians and Colossians. I've generally avoided anything on the deutero-Pauline epistles thus far, and really only purchased it because of the library plate on the fly-leaf:

'This book is the property of

The Hoult Library

Free Methodist Church

New Mills. Derbyshire

and is on loan to

Rev. Keith Beckingham

as long as required.'

Wouldn't like to be paying his fine.....!

Am also currently waiting delivery of Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the university library. I imagine that it's quite a hefty tome - although probably not quite as large as my LSJ 9th edition. I couldn't find it when I was down there the other week, but even if I had, I probably could not have managed to hump it all the way back home on the train. My neck was cricked enough after filling my back-pack to capacity with impulse borrowings. Seven pound fifty is a bargain for door-to-door delivery.

The illustration at the top is one of my favourite pre-Raphaelite paintings by one of their lesser-known brethren Henry Alexander Bowler. Painted in 1855, it is titled The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live? (on display in theTate Collection). This is a quotation from Ezekiel which describes God showing Ezekiel the valley of dry bones. The butterfly, resting on the skull of John Faithful, is a traditional symbol of the Resurrection. The word ‘Resurgam’ is inscribed on the headstone, and translates as ‘I shall rise again’. It is typical of the Victorian tendency towards maudlin sentiment, but I just love the delicately backlit horse-chestnut leaves.

Gothic Urges

2009-05-11T14:14:00.012+01:00

I was suddenly seized last week with the desire to have a look at the Gothic language (not the language of Goths, those black-clad pasty-faced miserablists....er, I mean alternative moodsters that blight bus-shelters and bung-up Subway). Having Googled to see what the preferred grammar on it was --- Joseph Wright's 1910 'Grammar of the Gothic Language' since you ask --- I happily remembered that I'd actually seen a second-hand copy in the local St Paul's book shop. Absolutely certain that nobody else in the whole wide world would ever dream of buying such a book, I confidently sauntered there to purchase the aforesaid. And would you believe it.....it had been SOLD!!!! WHAT!!! I thought there was only me who was interested in that sort of stuff. Obviously not....so that's a bit creepy. There's someone else like me about.

Saturday saw a rather satisfying padded envelope plop through the letterbox. Actually, it didn't plop.....it sort of squirmed its way through: undue wear and tear on the draught strip (caused by posties shoving packages through rather than spending a few extra seconds ringing the bell and handing it over face-to-face) means that anything fatter than your standard letter struggles to make its way through the slot. It was a copy of N.T.Wright's 'Paul in Fresh Perspective' the published and slightly tweaked collection of his Hulsean Lectures. Wright is a scholar who seems to sharply divide opinion and I look forward to reading his thoughts. When leafing through, I was amused to note that he accepts Ephesians and Colossians as part of the authentic Pauline corpus, and although he admits occasionally drawing upon them (and Acts) to illustrate a point, he generally confines himself to the 'undisputed' epistles. His reason for tentatively including the 'deutero-Paulines' is that - when push comes to shove - he feels he should 'conform to the episcopal stereotype'!!!

My early morning reading of late has been 'What Happens When We Die' by Dr Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor who has carried out extensive studies into Near Death and Out-of-Body experiences. Contrary to what you might imagine this was a very uplifting book: nearly all those who had undergone NDEs (bright light, tunnel, assembled relatives, angelic guides etc) remembered their experiences as positive, comforting and life changing - regardless of their religion, spirituality or lack of it. Parnia examines the theoretical possibilities of such common ground - the 'dying brain' scenario being the one most favoured at this point: the brain, starved of oxygen releases chemicals that trigger feelings of euphoric contentment. But it is his examination of consciousness that was most interesting, in that there is nothing in the brain that can, in itself, be 'fingered' as the generator of the consciousness. Just because the brain manifests consciousness does not mean that it initiates it, very much as a TV set manifests images that do not actually originate from its working parts. And seeing which parts of the brain light up in a scan when it is subjected to certain stimuli does not mean that they are actually the source of the emotions felt. Parnia seems to think that mankind does not have the wherewithal to explain consciousness as yet, just as the 18th century scientists knew that there was a form of energy that we now understand as electromagnetism, but that they were then unable to assimilate. Fascinating stuff.

Less strenuous bedtime reading has recently consisted of Marina Lewycka's 'Two Caravans', an engaging tale of immigrant agricultural workers who risk every kind of economic exploitation in their pursuit of a 'better life'. The lasting legacy of this book is a desire to avoid processed chicken of any sort (read it and you'll see why....).

I've also really enjoyed Moshin Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. The unusual literary device of addressing the non-responsive reader in the second person, plus his cool, precise prose makes this book one of my favourite reads of this year so far, even if I anticipated the ending motif somewhat in advance.

I also have to admit to buying the Saint Jerome Daily Missal that I caught sight of a few months back. As it is now post-Easter and the volume runs from Low Sunday until July 31st, I felt sort-of justified. What swayed my decision to purchase was its illustrations - beautifully stark wood-cuts (of a type much-favoured in the sixties) by the Dutch artist Jan Sleper. It is a piece of artwork that is a joy to own.

A trip down to uni. meant some time spent in the smaller of its libraries and a heavy backpack full of books to lug around for the rest of the day. I'd only noted a couple of titles to pick up (Kasemann's and Cranfield's commentaries on Romans), but like a child in a sweet shop I kept seeing books that I just knew would 'come in handy' and, as the account limit is twenty books at any one time, I went for it big time. This means that I have an enormous pile of stuff to wade through for material. Hey ho! Time to crank up the reading hours again!

Classics and Frauds

2009-05-04T21:23:00.009+01:00

Actually - the further I read through The Moses Legacy, the worse it got, so I just skipped through the last few chapters, reading only the chapter-end summaries. Meh!.

Ordered my own copy of 'The Gargoyle' from one of Amazon's subs: it arrived pretty quickly, but turned out to be a hard-back. Never mind - it's going out on loan soon. I do want to read it again, but maybe not yet.

Called in at the Barbican Bookshop on a rainy afternoon last week and found TWO books that made the whole day worthwhile: Ernst Kasemann's 'Perspectives on Paul'and Robert Martin-Achard's 'From Death to Life: A Study of the Development of the Doctrine of the Resurrection in the Old Testament'. this latter could not have come at a more opportune moment as I am currently writing about the Judaic conception of the afterlife, from the earliest times through to the Mishnaic period. The former is, of course, a classic. Both came to a mere £7.

Amused myself today by knocking up a couple of facsimile 'papyrus fragments' (inspired by Evangelical Textual Criticism's blogpost

http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/05/p52-for-sale-on-ebay.html)

I thought I'd also do P52 - so I did - and then a fragment of the late 2nd/early 3rd century CE Coptic 'Dialogue of the Saviour' (Nag Hammadi). I have to say that both mine actually look far more authentic than the one advertised on eBay does. Maybe a new career beckons?

**ha! if you look carefully at the picture of 'P52' above, you can see the reflection of me taking the photo!**

The Moses Legacy

2009-04-27T14:15:00.006+01:00

Frustrated that I was unable to get hold of a copy of 'Sisters of Sinai' and feeling the need for a little biblical mystery, I borrowed a copy of 'The Moses Legacy' by Graham Philips. Although I haven't finished it yet, the thrust of this book is that the 'Moses' who is mentioned in the Old Testament is, in fact, a composite character and that the events over which he presides occur at intervals so separated in time that he could not possibly be just one man. It's all very interesting, but rather bitty - I am finding it very difficult to keep the events discussed in order in my head, despite the fact that the author provides a handy summary at the end of every chapter. No foot or end-notes either, so no checking up on sources. I'm uneasy about his expertise too: his previous works are so diverse that I would call his 'scholarship' (such as it is) 'scattershot'. Once I started noticing that various statements were (from my semi-knowledgable point of view), somewhat dubious (esp. the section the pharoah Akhnaten's adoption of the Aten and the provenance of the OT), alarm bells started to ring and I decided to read a few reviews. I found this one on Amazon UK:

'When I was given this book as a present I could not wait to read it. Attractively presented, it promised to provide authoritative answers - or at least up-to-date research results - for questions which are bound to be of interest to anyone wishing to learn about the history of the Judaeo-Christian religions. Readers without much previous knowledge of this subject, and especially readers without any knowledge of Hebrew, will greatly enjoy the book and will think they have learned much from it, even if they may be somewhat surprised by such statements as 'The present Old Testament comes from a Greek translation known as the Septuagint' (p.23). Any readers with even an elementary knowledge of Hebrew, however, will find themselves in a very different position. To them it will soon become clear that the author does not have any knowledge of that language, though he does not hesitate to base much of his argument on detailed interpretation of Hebrew words he does not understand or misunderstands One single paragraph on p.115, for instance, contains at least four separate such misinterpretations.In itself this flaw obviously undermines some of the book's argument, but a moment's reflection will show that its effect goes much further. Even fewer readers than those who have some Hebrew will be familiar with any of the other ancient oriental languages used in the argument of the book, and once the author's Hebrew knowledge is shown to be non-existent it is no longer possible to place any confidence in his knowledge of these other languages - and thus in the conclusions of his whole argument. A health warning is most needed where that which is to be avoided is most attractive and at the same time most dangerous. By these criteria this book needs to be accompanied by a very large health warning.'

Alfred Moritz Former Professor of Classics, University of Cardiff.

You can't beat peer-review to sift out the chaff.

Hokum, then: but enjoyable hokum none the less. Not Dan Brown though, and still possibly good for provoking some after-dinner chit-chat.

Cosmological Schemata......and Book Mysteries

2009-04-23T09:49:00.011+01:00

Strangely, I received an email from Amazon yesterday asking me to rate my transaction 'Sisters of Sinai'......as I had not received anything from them and was unsure as to the status of my order (see earlier post), I immediately went online and noted that that order appeared to be dead. Somewhat irritated, I logged on to The Book Depository and promptly ordered a copy from them. Hopefully it will arrive before too long - the BD are usually pretty good. Still, I originally ordered it from the BD through the agency of Amazon at £14.39: I am paying £15.64 to get it direct from the BD! If I had known that I would have had to wait, I would have gone directly to the BD in the first place!!! And will do in the future.

Whilst we were away in Venice, I managed to miss a programme on the BBC called 'The Narnia Code'. The other night, I caught up with it on BBC iPlayer (what a useful asset that is!) Whilst the programme was, in effect, a huge plug for Dr Michael Ward's book 'Planet Narnia' (not that I have a problem with that - it's wonderful when someone's PhD research is truly commercially viable), it laid out the intriguing notion that the seven chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis contained symbolism found within medieval cosmological theory. Apparently the idea came to Dr Ward late one night when he was reading one of Lewis's poems containing a couple of lines that referred to the imagined attributes of Jupiter, and it immediately struck him that those lines summed up, in a nutshell, the plot of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'.

Excited by his insight, he examined the qualities of the other members of the medieval cosmic hierarchy - the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars and saturn - and discovered that the writing contained in the other six Narnia books was indeed richly symbolic of those heavenly bodies. It was all a bit of a tease though: we found out that, for example, 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' alluded to 'Sol' - the sun, with its imagery of dawns, dragons and the eastern horizon, and that 'The Silver Chair', where the prince is thought to be a lunatic, is the 'Luna' or 'moon book'. 'Prince Caspian', with its themes of war, is the 'Mars book', who was also imagined to be the deity connected with woods and forests, hence the emphasis on the tree symbolism in that volume. I would have been fascinated to find out more and it was hinted that the theory was fully extrapolated....in the book! Grrr! Something else I'll just have to buy.....

It did occur to me, as it obviously did to the makers of the programme, that Holst's 'Planet' suite (used as a soundtrack) fits quite nicely alongside Dr Ward's theory, but maybe that, too, is tackled in the book.

**update: received an email from the Book Depository telling me that my order couldn't be fulfilled and so they were refunding my money. So why in Sam Hill wasn't the book flagged up as 'out-of-stock' when I placed my order? Oooooh!!!**

'The Gargoyle' by Andrew Davidson

2009-04-17T15:21:00.005+01:00

In the event, I didn't take 'The Dante Trap' on holiday with me: for one thing it turned out to be a hardback (being a library book, THAT should have come as no surprise!) and thus rather cumbersome, for another it seems to be one of those books that feel the need to point out to its reader just how urbane and sophisticated it is, but ultimately I just can't take a hero seriously who 'leaves a black orchid as his calling card'! Tsk!

I ended up taking a paperback copy of 'The Gargoyle' by Andrew Davidson, which I picked up by chance whilst checking out the other book. Even though it is a 'Richard and Judy Book Club Book', which - sad snob that I am - I usually try to assiduously avoid. As I have mentioned before, holiday books have to tick certain boxes, and this one fitted the bill perfectly - with the added bonus of dealing with some pretty big philosophical issues. The unnamed protagonist, hideously burned in a car accident, relates the tale of his former life as a physically perfect hedonist and that of Marianne, a sculptress who he meets in hospital. She in turn relates episodes from their 'former lives' together as she tries to expiate her 'sins' by carving - and thus 'releasing' - gargoyles from stone. The theme is of course, redemption. But whose? Does Marianne really recall their lives as medieval Germans, or is she (as her status as a psychiatric patient would suggest) completely delusional? Does the hero really love her, as she tells him he does, or is she a meal-ticket who fills the void in his scarred life?

I read this book voraciously. Some of the prose is a bit rambling and overblown, but as a first novel (and I'm staggered to find that it is), it is extraordinary in both its philosophical depth and its bredth of knowledge. I also have to also that I am fascinated by the subjects that the author seems so knowledgable about - namely medecine and the preservation of knowledge. I am currently re-reading it as it is one of those books whose earlier parts become clearer with hindsight. And that is something I am inclined to do for very, very few books.

Temptation - but not a book this time!

2009-04-07T17:32:00.004+01:00

Solved my holiday literature problem by trawling the 'net for books set in Venice, reading a few reviews and deciding, almost at random that 'The Dante Trap' by Arnaud Delalande would probably fit the bill quite nicely. Phoned the library and got them to reserve me a copy to pick up in the next few days. The library is ideal for this: there are very few novels that I really want to own, and holiday books are definitely of the most ephemeral sort.

Now that Lent is drawing to an end I am really fancying a glass of wine, a nice chilled sauvignon blanc, particularly as it is the school holidays. Nuff said! A little voice keeps telling me "Go on. Have one. You've made your point." It sounds so reasonable doesn't it? And that's the way temptation works: we don't do bizarre or out-of-character things when we give in to it - on the contrary it's just an extension of our innermost nature, our untrammelled σαρξ. But I know it's the thin end of the wedge. If I give in now, there is no point to my having started in the first place, and next year I may not bother at all. No, I shall resist. What could be better than the anticipation of a reward for a job completed and done properly?

Holiday Reading

2009-04-06T15:33:00.006+01:00

I am very, very pernickety about what I read on holidays. The book has got to feel j-u-s-t right or I really do get quite grumpy. I've made some real mistakes in the past: St Augustine's 'City of God' on a Greek beach holiday when daughter no.3 was three months old (what was I thinking of?); Nikos Kazantzakis' 'The Fratricides' which just filled me with gloom as I finished it off on the last day of a holiday filled with rain; 'The Thirteenth Apostle' which I threw across the apartment in disgust....and so it goes. I feel a bit like Des Esseints in Huysmans' 'Against Nature' neurotically trying to match aesthetic experiences. But, for me, holiday reading is part of the whole holiday experience. Thus I am wondering what to take with me to Venice. I am stricken with regret that I have already read Sally Vickers' 'Miss Garnett's Angel' as that would have been little short of perfect - well-written, but easily digested and with the correct sort of atmosphere and sense of place. As would 'The Seven Sisters' by Margaret Drabble. Or 'The End of Mr Y' by Scarlett Thomas - but I've read them already too, and I rarely do re-reads. I want something with a decent plot that will distract me if there's any turbulence on the flight, but not too complex. It has to be well-written.....nothing Dan Brown-ish, not pure thriller, but definitely with some intrigue. The local library hasn't turned up anything for me as yet, although the husband is happily getting on with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods' (which I am eyeing enviously). I guess I'm just going to have to head for Borders and grumpily poke at the shelves. I am emphatically not like one of my former colleagues who took with him to Crete Denniston's 'Greek Particles' and a few volumes of Livy (in the original)!!!

Duh? A Guide for the Perplexed

2009-04-03T14:37:00.004+01:00

Don't know what's happening really......got an email from Amazon yesterday indicating that they were making a refund to my card, but on checking my order status, I see that my order (Sisters of Sinai) is still 'live' with an estimated delivery date of a couple of weeks. I ordered it from The Book Depository via Amazon and on checking the former, found that they still claim to have it in stock. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see if it turns up. I have, however, spent the money allocated for it in my current account: on an Everyman guidebook for our upcoming trip to Venice. The Everyman guides are sumptuous - too heavy to lug around in a daysack (as are the equally fine Dorling Kindersley versions) but essential for finding out about hidden treasures that are not flagged up by the far shorter and more portable 'InSight' guide (with map) that I bought in preparation last week. The 'Everyman' is the sort of thing to pore over on the plane, planning out itineraries, or over breakfast, or dinner, or sitting up in bed at the hotel.

Our Lady of the Forest II (spoiler)

2009-04-03T09:27:00.004+01:00

Well, I finished Dave Guterson's 'Our Lady of the Forest' and am left pondering the denouement and the themes.

It seems to me that expiry of Ann the seer completes an allegory of the Passion, and I am trying to figure out who the book's characters represent, if indeed they represent anyone other than themselves - it could be my imagination. Ann herself is truly the Suffering Servant, reviled and scorned, deemed unfit (except by her acolytes) as a vehicle for divinity. Father Butler makes an adequate Caiaphas, and the ambivalent Father Collins would fit with Nicodemus. Carolyn Greer probably represents Judas, who sells Ann out for hard cash and is ultimately responsible for her death. But exactly who does Tom Cross (note the name) represent? I think that the answer might be 'every man', man that cannot bear the weight and responsibility of his own actions and needs to feel that there is a higher force that can forgive, comfort and redeem. But deeper than this narrative is the theme of truth: what is the reality behind Ann's revelations? How did she know the whereabouts of the disappeared Leigh-Ann's bones? How did she find the buried water source in the forest, later credited with healing powers?

Was the truth that she had already stumbled across the dead child's remains during her spell as a mushroom hunter? In the sodden forest, would a pool appear wherever one dug out a pond? Indeed, did she really receive visitations from the Virgin Mary, or were they the product of her over self-medication?

The end story is that the whole episode has a redeeming effect on all who have come in contact with Ann: Father Collins gets his long-desired new church, paid for by the swarming faithful; Father Butler is made Vicar-General; Carolyn Greer funds a temporarily exotic lifestyle through larceny of the funds entrusted to her, but finally comes to realise the hollowness of it all; Tom Cross finds salvation in devoting himself to serving the newly-built church and caring for the son he believes that he crippled; the previously semi-derelict logging town of North Fork is saved by the steady flow of pilgrims and their money.

Ann is ultimately the catalyst for their change, but like so many catalysts, is herself consumed and destroyed in the process.

Our Lady of the Forest

2009-03-31T15:56:00.007+01:00

Have nearly finished Dave Guterson's 'Our Lady of the Forest' and what a damn fine read it has been!

Set in the dank forests of the Pacific north-west, near a run-down logging town populated by the disillusioned and feckless (think 'Shameless' meets 'Axe Men'), it tells the story of Ann, a frail, runaway, asthmatic teenage survivor of chronic sexual and drug abuse. Scratching a living by finding chanterelle mushrooms in the forests' undergrowth, she finds herself receiving 'visitations' from the Virgin Mary. Before long she has attracted the attention of the bored, the curious, the religious and the exploitative. One is never quite sure about the provenance of these sightings: are they induced by her constant self-medication for her various ailments? Stoner flashbacks? Desire for attention? Or her subliminal longing for a non-judgmental mother who will protect her from what her own flesh and blood failed to?

It's beautifully written and Guterson evokes well the menacing atmosphere of both the forest and of the increasingly hysterical swarm of pilgrims that gather, plaguing her to intercede for them. I'm not sure how it will end.

He has assembled a cast of pretty unappealing characters: Tom Cross, the surly ex-logger whose driven machismo has led to his son's quadriplegia in a work-related accident; Father Collins, a young but rather world-weary priest who finds himself attracted to Ann rather more than just spiritually; Carolyn Greer, a cynical new-ager and Ann's self-appointed spokeswoman who cares neither for Ann nor her visitations just so long as she gets a cut of the profits, and Father Butler, a gimlet-eyed doctrinaire who is intent on certifying the girl as a fraud or psychotic.

I just hope it's not one of those books that run out of steam in the last few chapters. There are a number of themes running through the book: can they be brought to a satisfying and united resolution? I hope so!

Sisters of Sinai

2009-03-30T12:45:00.004+01:00

Recently I've been quite good with online purchases, that is, I've been staying away from Amazon and the like* and restricting my purchases to second-hand/charity shops. However, I had to make an exception today when I read about a newly published book called 'Sisters of Sinai' by Janet Soskice. It is right up my street: travel, preservation of knowledge, biblical and female scholarship combined. The Random House review reads:

'Sisters of Sinai tells an extraordinary tale of nineteenth century exploration; how two Scottish sisters made one of the most important ancient manuscript finds of the age. Hidden in a cupboard beneath the monastic library at St Catherine’s in the Sinai desert the twins discovered what looked like a palimpsest: one text written over another.It was Agnes who recognized the obscured text for what it was – one of the earliest copies of the Gospels written in ancient Syriac.Once they had overcome the stubborn reluctance of Cambridge scholars to authenticate the find and had lead an expedition of quarrelsome academics back to Sinai to copy it, Agnes and Margaret –in middle years and neither with any university qualifications – embarked on a life of demanding scholarship and bold travel.In this enthralling book, Janet Soskice takes the reader on an astonishing journey from the Ayreshire of the sisters’ childhood to the lost treasure trove of the Cairo genizah.We trace the footsteps of the intrepid pair as they voyage to Egypt, Sinai and beyond, Murray’s guide book in hand coping with camels, unscrupulous dragomen, and unpredictable welcomes.We enter the excitement and mystery of the Gospel origins at a time when Christianity was under attack in Europe.Crucially this is the story of two remarkable women who, as widows, were undeterred in their spirit of adventure and who overcame insuperable odds to become world class scholars with a place in history.'

The author is Reader in Philosophical Theology at Jesus College, Cambridge.

I await my copy with great eagerness.

*interestingly enough, once again it was cheaper to get this volume from The Book Depository through Amazon, rather than from The Book Depository direct.

HT Evangelical Textual Criticism

Cranfield Calls

2009-03-27T13:06:00.007Z

When I was working at my desk the other day, I ran out of space and had to move some books out of the way (it happens quite often). So I picked up the two volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies and put them on the shelf just under the printer and forgot about them. Dammit - forgot the sun swings round during the course of the day so that by two in the afternoon that shelf is bathed in full sunlight - which did my two new acquisitions absolutely no good at all!

So much for letting them dry out slowly: the bottom-most one was OKish, but the front cover of the upper one was bent as a banana by the sun's unrelenting warmth.

I had to call in LSJ (my biggest book) as well as a couple of concordances BDAG and BDF to weigh the b*gger down and flatten the cover out again. I curse my oversight. Now I need to conserve the spine with some appropriately organic glue. Fish bone or hooves, I think.

It still being Lent, and having finished The Book of Margery Kempe, I am going to turn my attention to Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love'. I bought this Penguin Classics version second-hand a number of years ago and now intend to re-read it as a spiritual companion piece of contemporaneous medieval piety. I also have 'The Cloud of Unknowing' (again a second-hand Penguin Classics) which I may read during Easter week if I have finished Dame Julian's book.

The Douglas Moo commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans is most excellent: his attention to the textual and linguistic issue puts it squarely in my field of interest. However, as I am currently looking in great detail at Romans 5:12-14, I find my self time and time again directed towards C.E.B Cranfield's two-volume ICC commentary, constantly cited as THE authoritative voice on this epistle. And can I find a pre-owned copy? Well, yes I can, but not for less than £40! I have the Sanday ICC precursor to Cranfield and that is quite adequate, but it's the Cranfield that I really hanker for. It IS on Google books, but as is so often the case, the very pages that I wish to consult are 'not part of this preview'. Most vexing. Nor will the all-in-one Cranfield commentary fit the bill, as in its drive to become more compact and, I suppose, more user-friendly, it has omitted the very textual matters that I find so interesting. That's a shame because the compendium volume is easily and cheaply available brand-new. Ah!....but I LIKE the older ICC's with their green cloth covers and gilt titles, and their slightly musty smell and damp feel......I promise I will not let them sunbathe neglected on my shelf.....

The (damp) Homilies of John Chrysostom

2009-03-23T13:52:00.006Z

Spotted two 'Library of the Fathers' volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies (6 & 7; Romans and Galatians & Ephesians) in the Barbican Bookshop the other day. I was initially quite interested, but it was only when I started reading Douglas Moo's NICNT commentary on Romans, and saw that he notes Chrysostom's preference in 5:1 for the hortatory subjunctive ἔχωμεν ('let us have') over the present active indicative ἔχομεν ('we have') that I thought Oooh! Textual commentary! So of course I went back this morning and purchased the two books, invoking my 15% theological student-card privileges. I wonder where the other volumes of the series have gone? The volume on Romans is in a particularly delapidated condition and needs attention to the spine (my last university's remedy was a nice thick piece of electrical tape!), and both smell somewhat damp, so I'll need to dry them out v-e-r-y slowly and thoroughly. I'm gradually accumulating a good selection of patrologia, including two of the Eerdmans Ante-Nicene Fathers series (volumes 1 & 2; Justin Martyr & Irenaeus and Hermas, Tatian, Athenagorus, Theophilus & Clement of Alexandria respectively) and the Loeb Ehrman 2 volume 'Apostolic Fathers'. But my dream-buy, only achievable with lottery-funding would be a complete set of the Eerdmans (both Ante-Nicene and Nicene) from the local St Paul's bookshop. If I get doctoral funding this year.....(hah!)*sigh* One can dream. Otherwise I'll just have to stick to scuffling around 2nd hand bookshops and charity shops for random opportune buys. Though actually, it's probably more fun and better for the soul to do it this way.

Moo or Peake?

2009-03-20T09:28:00.004Z

This quite often happens to me: I buy a book that I have been craving for some time (in this instance Douglas Moo's NICNT commentary on Romans) and dang me if I find, completely serendipitously, another book on the very same day that I just have to buy (Peake' s Commentary on the Bible - £4.99 from Oxfam). Now I just can't decide which one merits first read: Moo or Peake? Each of the weighty volumes tick different boxes, the detailed or the broad, and I'm impressed by the scholarly names appended to the articles in the latter: Henry Chadwick, Charles Cranfield, Geoffrey Lampe, Bruce Metzger, Charles Moule, Nigel Turner and Allen Wikgren int al. A perfect snapshot of traditional biblical exegesis.

Of course it's not a bad dilemma to face: I'll just have to ramp up my reading hours by waking up an hour earlier than ususal, and going to bed an hour later at night.

Gender Analysis Part 3

2009-03-11T16:39:00.001Z

Back to 60% certainty now......must've been the OMG that swung the percentages back up!

Gender Analysis Part 2

2009-03-11T16:36:00.002Z

OMG! After writing the last post I re-fed the blog back into the gender analyzer...and guess what...it's now only 53% certain to have been written by a woman!

Gender Analysis

2009-03-11T16:29:00.002Z

Over at http://genderanalyzer.com/ they're 56% percent certain that this blog is written by a woman. I wonder what clues they look for? I'm going to feed in some obviously girly/blokey websites and see just how high the testosterone/oestrogen percentage gets.
Actually, I'm quite proud of being somewhat ambiguous to a computer program!

The Book of Margery Kempe

2009-03-05T12:15:00.003Z

Picked up for 59p at the Help the Aged charity shop.

It's an interesting little book, the autobiographical ramblings of a woman, born at the end of the 14th century, who may have been a true mystic, receiving many communications from Christ, or a raving psychotic, depending on your world-view. The non-chronological anecdotes were transcribed at her behest by two scribes who worked under her close scrutiny and are remarkable in the picture that they present of her life as a comfortably-off medieval gentlewoman, and of her frequent pilgrimages both throughout England and abroad. The writing is unaffected and direct and tells us much about both her everyday and interior life, and her frequent mystical experiences which left her weeping copiously, leading to much hostility from those around her.

I get the impression that she would not have been an easy person to live with - she was seized not only with floods of tears (c/w moaning and loud wailing) but sudden desires to forgo meat and wine, wear only white clothing, attend confession on a very regular basis, and to live in a 'chaste marriage' with her long-suffering husband, John. He, unsurprisingly, is less keen on all of her enthusiasms but- to give him his due, he seems to have loved her, stuck up for her against her detractors and reached a cordial accommodation with her whims. Actually, she seems to have brought her own money to the marriage, so perhaps he had little say in it all. I'm about halfway through the book at the moment. Being Lent, it is indeed appropriate spiritual reading. I find that I am warming to her, although she is almost piteous in her determination to be seen as misunderstood. I think that she almost certainly had severe post-natal depression, not to say psychosis after the birth of her first child and that it was this that pre-disposed her to her mystical 'attacks'. I can truly sympathise with her in this. Following the birth of my third child there were a number of occasions where I really felt that I was losing my grip on reality and was subject to a number of inner locutions that d.g. lead me back to sanity, rather than in the opposite direction. Maybe it is the thinning of the psyche that primes people for mystical experiences, and how it is viewed depends on the recipient's willing acceptance, or revulsion, of the supranormal.

Margery went on to have thirteen more children. I myself stopped at four.

Sweet Charity (Shops)

2009-03-05T10:09:00.004Z

I seem to spend my life scuffling about in charity shops looking for books, don't I? Well, that's because they're so cheap there. But I have noticed a price heirarchy even amongst these. Here is my report on book prices in the charity shops of York, starting with the most expensive first.

1) Oxfam: it has two dedicated bookshops in York, plus one general clothes/brick-a-brack shop with a sizeable book section. Good range of books, shelved in categories, fiction subdivided as classics/popular/sci-fi/crime etc, then sorted alphabetically by author. Textbooks/non-fiction tends to be somewhat outdated. Small section first editions/collector's items. Good children's section. The price for a paperback is generally £2.99 -£3.49 depending on perceived poularity.

2) The Heart Foundation: Good selection of popular literature, sorted alphabetically by author; smaller selection of non-fiction, mostly outdated. Some 'collector's items. I bought a fairly tatty Penguin Classics edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls for £1.50 here. Most paperback fiction c. the same price as Oxfam.

3) Scope: I don't tend to go in here much, the books are very run of the mill stuff (Dan Brown, Aga-sagas) plus much outdated non-fiction. And they're always pestering you to buy raffle tickets.

4) Mind: A reasonable number of books at the back, subdivided into basic categories. Paperback fiction about £1.50-£2.99. Never seem to get much new stuff in. Small children's section.

5) Sue Ryder: started off with quite a lot of stock, both fiction and non-fiction, at reasonable prices -about the same as Mind, some of them obviously quite new.. Book shelves are getting smaller though. Pity.

6) The Autism Society: lots of pot-boilers, but redeemed themselves in my eyes by having a sale where all books were 50p. I bought Oliver Sack's 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat' and Peter Hoeg's 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow'. Still to be read.

6) PDSA: Books generally divided just into paperback or hardback. All books £1 at the moment, except for a few 'collector's items' which are £3. I bought Farrar's 'Life of Christ' here last week.

7) Save The Children: very small shop, but proportionally large book shelf. Good turnover. Prices fluctuate, but fairly decent paperback fiction is generally around the £1.50-£2.00 mark.

8) Age Concern: fusty little section at the back of the shop. Not much stock, but reasonable turnover. Top price seems to be £1.50 for a paperback. Bought an Oxford Classics text of Wilkie Collins 'The Woman in White' for 50p.

9) Help the Aged: seems to have stopped caring about its bookshelves. Lots of dross - romance and war, but the odd gem. Just bought Penguin Classics version of 'The Book of Margery Kempe' for 59 pence. More of this anon.

Also to be mentioned are the Red Cross Shop, The Cat's Protection League, the Woodlands shop and the St Leonard's Hospice shop: they tend to have a small and generally poor selection books. I almost never go in, and when I do there's seldom anything I want.

Biblio-stalking

2009-03-03T09:42:00.001Z

Spooky really......As I wrote in my last post, I find myself gradually acquiring the works of the theological author Frederic William Farrar (left). Farrar was a child of the British Empire, born in Bombay in 1831, educated initially in the Isle of Wight, then at King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the years he rose from a humble schoolmaster to become the Dean of Canterbury - he is often referred to simply as Dean Farrar. His theological writings were copious - he was a humane and catholic scholar who believed, along with the church father Origen that no-one could be disqualified from redemption. Well, having purchased his 'Early Days of Christianity' just the other day, imagine my surprise when in the PDSA charity shop, there on the shelves amid the knick-knacks and single sherry glasses lay.....Farrar's 'Life of Christ', illustrated with engravings by the pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt (he who painted 'The Light of the World' that hangs in St Paul's cathedral in London). Marvelling at such spooky serendipity, I took it to the counter where, for £3, it became part of my burgeoning collection.

I'll admit that his writings will certainly not be to all tastes - he is typical of the Victorian writer who writes with a great deal of sentiment and feels quite free to interpret facts and assert psychological motive. Neither is he averse to purple prose. But I rather enjoy it - it is a refreshing change from academic prose which, in its struggle to be factual and fair, often ends up as flat, dull and dry as dust. Who could resist a writer who writes

'It was natural that there should be some stir in the little household at the coming of such a Guest, and Martha, the busy, eager-heartyed, affectionate hostess, "on hospitable thoughts intent", hurried to and fro, and was distracted with excited energy to prepare for His proper entertainment. Her sister Mary, too, was anxious to receive him fittingly, but her notions of the reverence due to Him were of a different kind. Knowing that her sister was only too happy to do all that could be done for His material comfort, she, in deep humility, sat at His feet and listened to His words.'?

A Little Englishman's Greek New Testament

2009-02-24T14:05:00.004Z

Re-reading F.W.Farrar's excellent (and slightly gossipy) 'Lives of the Fathers' (Church fathers, that is -written in 1889), I came across a reference to his slightly earlier work 'The Early Days of Christianity' written 1884. "Hmmm...." I thought.

Now I have a problem (actually, several problems) in that if I find an author that I enjoy, I hanker after possessing all that author's corpus. It happened with Thomas Hardy. It happened with Nikos Kazantzakis. If it weren't for the fact that there are so damn many of them, I dare say that it would happen with the Loeb Classical Texts too. As I was in town with daughter no3 on Saturday, I bargained with her that if I accompanied her to various music/clothes shops, she might indulge her ma by stopping off at the very excellent Barbican Bookshop on our way home. I love that shop...the smell of old books, damp, mildew whatever....the rickety stairs....the antiquarian section, locked away behind old glazed doors...the sense that there are treasures to be found and bargains to be had. And indeed there were! On the 'Early Church History Shelf' was a copy of Farrar's 1884 volume, for a mere £3!!! Furthermore, in the Greek and Hebrew section my eye fell on 'The Englishman's Greek New Testament', a little 6x4 pocket volume from 1896 (the 3rd edition) that manages to pack onto each page the Greek text complete with an interlinear literal English rendering and, packed around the margins the 1611 Authorised Version. It is indeed a thing of wonder and beauty, but the text is very, very small indeed. Even with my new spectacles, eyestrain sets in within minutes!

Damned Unpleasant

2009-02-23T13:44:00.002Z

Actually, Huysmans' 'The Damned' has some really, really unpleasant stuff in it that was most disturbing. I shan't go into detail lest it bring the sickos who surf the web searching for that sort of thing flocking like flies round....well, you know. Suffice to say that I have revised my opinion about Huysman. Even if graphic descriptions are presented as reportage, they are still graphic descriptions and, in my opinion, just as bad as writing purely for titillation.

I'll Be Damned...

2009-02-13T14:45:00.005Z

I rather like the wall of black Penguin Classics in my local Borders book shop. They look....well....pretty serious and intriguing. I think Borders has a Bit of a Problem knowing what to do with 'the classics', be it either of the Aristotelian or the Brontean sort. They started off a few years ago with a pretty good collection of Greek and Roman stuff (better than Waterstones, which doesn't even have a Classics section), including a few Loebs (drool, drool), general histories and Classical texts (but only major authors) in translation, all arranged in broadly alphabetical order. It seemed to work quite well. 'Classic' authors like Tolstoy and Hardy could be found slotted into the fiction section where alphabetically appropriate. That seemed to work quite well too. Over the past few years there has obviously been a rethink and subsequent revamp, and all the works by 'classic authors' (be they 4thcentury BC or 19th century AD) were lumped together, the Oxford Classics translations cheek by jowl with the Wordsworth Classics (very cheap and not to be underrated- my Aeneid was more faithful to the Latin than quite a few others I could name!), the stark black Penguin Classics and the lurid lime green bargain classics (which i can't bring myself to look at). This motley assembly obviously offended whoever is in charge of the shelf displays, and more recently the books have been divided by publishing houses. The Oxford Classics now present a wall of white, with red tips (a bit bland); the Wordsworths - a wall of blue, with cute little cameo pictures on the spine; the lime green monsters just look hideous, but the Penguin Classics look sombre and studious and rather lovely. I like riffling through them for unknown (to me) gems, and it was this approach that led me to find and buy Huysmans' 'Against Nature' which I absolutely loved, enjoying every rich and bejewelled sentence. Last Friday, my duties discharged for the week, I took a copy of 'The Damned' up to the in-house Starbucks with the intention of leafing through it over a cup of de-caf Americano. But, as luck would have it WHO was sitting across the room from me but a priest acquaintance, who waved at me cheerily. Thinking that 'The Damned' was probably on the Index of Banned Books, and not wishing to give offence, I turned it over and covered it surreptiously with my copy of the Independent. So I did not get a chance to skim through it as I had wished.

I returned a few days later, however, and bought it, as the half-term holidays were coming up and I have the rare chance to read first thing in the morning for a week. I hope it will be as intriguing as 'Against Nature' - I've read a few online reviews and many of the people who 'get' Huysmans' writing (and there are many who complain that 'Nothing Happens' - well, duh!), rate it just as highly, and some even more so. He was such an encyclopaedically knowledgable writer. His discourses on the various topics within his books are fascinating lectures in their own right: I loved the chapter on the decay of Latin literature and envy his breadth of learning. Only this morning I read a wonderful description of the Grunewald Crucifixion.

Incidentally, whilst walking out of the book shop, who should I see walking in but my priest-acquaintance, who again waved cheerily at me. Fortunately I had my purchase secreted deep in my bag.

Not Quite a Book

2009-02-11T09:28:00.003Z

The doctoral studies rumble on: I'm getting to put down a fair number of words per day at the moment, which is quite gratifying, particularly since I have to meet my supervisor in ten days or so for a progress review. I think he was rather startled by my sudden interest in philosophy of language - the 'meaning' of meaning etc. - but was probably just happy that I'd actually got something down on paper, if not quite his area. I've put that topic on hold at the moment to tackle an examination of verb-forms in Paul's epistle to the Galatians, which is very much revisiting the territory of my MA. This time I'm looking at discourse prominence with reference to verbal aspect. One seminal, and not a little contraversial, book on the subject is Stanley E Porter's tome 'Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament', which, although thorough and impressively scholarly, is probably one of the most user-unfriendly books that I have come across: arbitrary changes in font-size (some disconcertingly small) and no subject index. The referencing isn't too hot either. There is an annoying tendency in academia to try and get away with stuff that wouldn't pass muster in, say, industry. And I'm not just talking about publications, either. The whole of academia seems chaotic, lacks planning, foresight, punctiliousness, punctuality, clarity, mired in a morass of information and words that lack cohesion, where arguments and hypotheses have to be teased from what seems to be unneccessary and willfully obscure prolixity. A clear, insightful mind and confident theory avoids obfuscation, surely: opaqueness cannot equal brilliance.

Another thing that is exercising my patience at the moment, is the sheer quantity of PDFs that are accumulating in boxes around my desk. I download a fair number per week, so I'm starting to wonder about the advantages of an iReader or the like. Would that work for PDFs? I must investigate....although I dislike reading text on screen (makes my eyes ache), the sheer mass of paper is becoming overwhelming, not to mention the expense of ink-cartridges (why so costly?) and paper. It's a tempting thought.....though Not Quite a Book.

A Bit of a Lull

2009-02-02T16:14:00.006Z

All quiet on the book-buying front, thank God. Or rather, O Dear! Buying = cheerful, but abstinence = despondence. O dear o deary dear. Still not quite right from the Christmas virus, I suppose. Can't think of anything I want to read particularly except fluff and postcards. Deep down, I know that I am a complete lightweight.

When I feel full of energy, I completely over-estimate my capacity for reading and schedule a bizarre programme that entails waking up extra-early to make room for 'intellectual' reading. But strangely enough, I don't schedule in any of the huge pile that I have to wade through for my doctorate: o no! I'll choose some random tome that I imagine will give me some deep insights but, because I am not versed in the language of that particular discipline, I end up abandoning it like some leaky tub. Amusing books are failing to amuse and I feel more and more like the hero of Huysmans' 'Against Nature' trying all manner of things to pique a jaded appetite and calm jangled nerves. Stephen Fry is failing to keep me either awake or interested. Yesterday I just sat, gormlessly staring into the middle distance, doing nothing, thinking nothing, unwilling to move until asked if I felt alright. Yes, I feel alright, but I am certainly not the person that I was a few weeks ago. My get up and go has got up and gone. At least temporarily. The lassitude has also crept into my writing: sitting at my desk today, I struggled to make sense of anything that I wrote last week, or even to care. Not helped by the presence of a dischooled child. I should maybe curl up with Thomas Aquinas, or Epictetus, or.......

Decadence and la nostalgie de la boue

2009-01-20T16:04:00.007Z

Part way through 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry and am starting to lose interest slightly: the bits where he writes of his protagonist's youth are excellent, and thus I am assuming that it is mostly himself that he is writing about, but the episodes dealing with his later life are much less amusing or convincing. Time to start on something fresh: Huysmans' 'Against Nature', or 'A Rebours' as it is in the original. The prose is gorgeous, in the same sumptuous and slightly over-rich vein as Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' (which I never finished, having had a surfeit of gorgeousness and the same feeling as if I had gorged a box of Belgian chocolates in one sitting). I rather like the 'hero' and his neurasthaenic extreme aestheticism. I am reminded of my late teenage years when I immersed myself in Gauloises, Pernod, Baudelaire and a nostalgie de la boue which lead me to mistakenly marry a complete idiot thus bringing my young self back to earth with a nasty bump! Fortunately, that is all far in the past and having extracted myself from la boue I became a wiser and more cynical person. One lasting influence from that bout of teenage Francophilism was an abiding interest in the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I ascribe a lot of my determination to her and her refusal to allow her sex to interfere with her intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately she harnessed herself to the toad-like Sartre and lived for much of her life in his shadow, despite the fact that she was the one whom Sartre trusted to critique his work, and whose ideas he often purloined and passed off as his own. Their relationship was lifelong, hardly exclusive and they often conspired to seduce and manipulate those who should have been able to trust them. I've not read the book detailing their correspondence: I fear that I would lose any faith that I had in 'Castor' (Sartre's nickname for de Beauvoir) left by Deirdre Bair's uncompromising biography. Suffice to say that two of my favourite comfort books are still de Beauvoir's 'Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter' and the follow-up volume of her autobiography 'The Prime of Life'. Obviously it is written from her point of view, and leaves out that which is inconvenient for her to remember or write about, but her spirit shines through - the spirit that motivated a younger self to Get The Hell Out.

Serendipity

2009-01-13T15:57:00.005Z

Although still not completely clear of virus I am attempting to get back into some academic reading after the Christmas break. The 'to-be-read' pile has increased significantly since my package of book-requests arrived from uni. the other day (see previous post), so some headway has to be made, whether I'm under-par or not. The most obvious candidate is Constantine Campbell's 'Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek' which has attracted a lot of online interest; some positive, some negative and a lot of interbloggular arse-kissing. I have to say that I am finding it rather interesting, somewhat didactic..but not necessarily in a bad way. In fact the repetiton does go some way to fix CC's principles in the mind (off-screen howls of protest that 'the dust has not settled on this particular field yet, so how can you talk of principle-fixing' yada yada). However it is not my intention to go into detail in this blog: any serious stuff will appear on 'metalepsis' when I have had a chance to cogitate, nay, pontificate, further.

Having finished 'The Raw Shark Texts' (ho hum: promising start, last two-thirds in need of a good editor), I was lacking a good 'bedtime' book: nothing too demanding. Not really wanting to lash out on 3 for 2 (there's usually only ever one on offer that I vaguely want), I trawled around the charity shops for suitable candidates. Nearly bought Michael Gruber's 'Book of Air and Shadows' but then remembered how disappointed I have been in this genre recently, so put it back on the shelf. Nothing else turned up, so I called into the library on the school-run and picked up 'The Liar' by Stephen Fry. The protagonist is so obviously Fry thinly disguised, and the print quality is atrocious, but I was actually laughing out loud within a few pages, so it will do the job nicely.

The daughter, now on maternity leave, wants an easily digestible book for comfort-reading so we tried to get hold of Victoria Hislop's 'The Return', but both Waterstones and Borders only had it in superlarge paperback format (at £12.99!). Sure that we'd seen it at normal size we went into some charity shops. No joy, but I did get hold of a Penguin Classics copy of 'The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English' - a bargain at £1.50, although slightly crumpled. It is currently being corrected under LSJ, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Moulton and Geden and Funk.

A Salutary Tale

2009-01-09T09:46:00.003Z

My new uni has the facility for dispatching up to four books, for a small fee, to distant students like me. This is most useful as I can peruse the online library catalogue and select some likely looking tomes without the expensive 3 hour train ride involved to get to campus. I compiled a list and submitted it with the appropriate money. Just before the Christmas break, I received an email from the library requesting that I return to them one of the books that I had borrowed on my last trip there at the beginning of the month. Grumbling somewhat I packaged it up in a jiffy-bag and sent it back recorded delivery, then set about bewailing the fact that I had scarcely had a chance to look at this seminal work. Oh well.
Yesterday, a knock on the door and the Parcelforce man passed over to me a big package from the uni library containing my requested books including.....yes, you've guessed!...the very book that I had returned by post a couple of weeks earlier. What an idiot.

Christmas and Thereafter

2009-01-04T16:34:00.005Z

Well that's Christmas over for another year, and as usual I am already wondering whether I could have appreciated the whole experience more. I think it must be an age thing: no sooner is an event over than I am filled with angst and regret that I maybe didn't make the most of it. Not that I could have this year (conditional perfect tense there!) as I spent most of the holiday break feeling distinctly ill with some kind of nasty virus that emptied me of energy and enthusiasm and left a nasty cough that is still lingering some two weeks later. Still, normality beckons.

I really enjoyed Hardy's 'The Well-Beloved' which proved a good comfort read in the circumstances, possibly not one of his greatest books but distinctly Hardy-esque in its concerns and characters.

The surprise arrival of a new laptop from my wonderful husband led me to the purchase of a couple of 'Dummies' books to ensure that I get to make the most of the programmes and make myself more efficient during the forthcoming academic term.

I wanted to get another Scarlett Thomas novel - 'PopCo' or 'Going Out' but, unsurprisingly, the local Borders store did not have them in stock so I ended up buying Steven Hall's 'The Raw Shark Texts'. I am glad I am no longer running a temperature as I'm not sure that I could handle its weirdness whilst feeling as 'off it' as I did. As it is, I am thoroughly enjoying it - a good contrast to my other current read - 'A Daughter's Love' - John Guy's study of the relationship between Sir Thomas More and his daughter Margaret, which is OK but not really what I'd call rivetting. I guess that tomorrow I am going to have to get a grip and start some academic reading: not something that I am really looking forward to at the moment. Doubtless I'll get into the swing of it in a couple of days. I hope!

Christmas Books Past and Present

2008-12-22T14:14:00.007Z

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

2008-12-16T14:23:00.004Z

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

2008-12-11T16:32:00.007Z

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.

2008-12-09T15:44:00.007Z

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.

A Book as a Present. For Me.

2008-11-27T13:27:00.007Z

For once I had a really good excuse to go shopping for books: a family Christening. Now, most Christening presents are useless tat that get shoved to the backs of cupboards to tarnish and eventually get thrown out. Really good presents are really expensive, things like a vintage port to lay down for the eventual 21st birthday (what 21 year-olds like port anyway?), or gold sovereigns...so I hit on the idea of a Really Nice Old Book. Will probably increase in value and prove saleable should the recipient be in need of a cash-injection in the future. Off to the local antiquarian book-shops, of which there are a few locally. My goodness, the Rackham-illustrated fairy tales are expensive: hundreds of pounds! As are most of the things that I had in mind. So what about a modern first edition? What I really wanted (perverse sense of humour surfacing here) was 'The Devil Rides Out' by Dennis Wheatley, and although there were Wheatley first editions, they looked a bit raunchy for an eighteen-month old. More suitable for his Dad, I think.

It was at this point that I got distracted, as I so often do, and I decided to go up the winding stairs to the theology section. Doing a doctorate gives me a sort of licence to peruse this section for Useful Books and, hey - what do you know - Nathan Han's 'A Parsing Guide to the Greek New Testament'. Wow - how fortuitous: a complete list of the verb forms as they occur. How useful is that for discourse prominence analysis?! And in good condition too - no dust-cover, but never mind, I'm running out of that adjustable film book-cover stuff anyway. So I bought it, chortling at my good fortune, and scuttled of to Starbucks where it is totally acceptable to sit awhile, reading like a Clever Person.

I have to confess a few previous sins to you at this point: I am addicted to online book buying. My favourite supplier is The Book Depository, because they don't add a delivery charge to most of their stuff, which tends to be as cheap, if not cheaper than Amazon. Though I do like Amazon too, because the sidebar options to buy second-hand from small dealers can yield some real bargains viz. my recent purchase 'A Greek New Testament Reader's Edition' in pristine condition from a guy at Oxford. And I like ABE Books to for the more obscure/out-of-print stuff (most recently 'Syriac Grammar: A New Approach'). Birthday money allowed me legitimately to buy 'A Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' (now satisfactorily covered with a film book-preserver) initially through the web, but when they postponed delivery I cancelled and bought it from the local St Paul's shop. The staff seemed so surprised that someone had actually bought something that they gave me a free St Paul calendar of saints' days. Another local second-hand bookshop had recently just got in a number of International Critical Commentaries (I am trying to collect a pre-owned copy for each of the books of the NT), including 2nd Corinthians which I was lacking and thereby hangs another shameful book-buying tale (for that, see another of my blogs 'parablepsis'). Suffice to say that I ended up buying 1st Corinthians too. Yesterday.

Being interested in language, I had been intending to buy the Penguin Classics annotated 'Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass', mostly for the brilliant word-play, and insights into Dodgson's mind and world. As I was going up the stairs in Borders, I picked up a copy of it to scan as I had my coffee (coffee is another addiction of mine, so there'll probably be many a mention of it in this blog unless I start another one dedicated to that too). I had taken the precaution of getting a mini bank statement before I started out, so I knew that I only had £7.55 to last me until Monday, having bought the parsing book - and I know that Penguin Classics tend to be expensive. Oh - and I had picked up a copy of Petronius' 'Satyricon' which I had been intending to read ever since I had read Apuleius' 'The Golden Ass' which I found surprisingly funny (tho' it did go off a bit at the end) - and that was £10.99! This last was just a reprint of a 1965 text, so the translation was a bit evasive to say the least, so I put that back. But for some strange reason the Lewis Carroll was only £5.99, well within budget so, reader, I bought it.....

More Books Than Sense: Introduction

2008-11-27T13:08:00.000Z

That's it: my book buying is way out of control!
This is my confessional - mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa - wherein I shall note my purchases, my motivation for them, their actual usefulness and their current location.
An attempt to analyse my....er....problem...