Serendipity

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.