Christmas Books Past and Present

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.

A Book as a Present. For Me.

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.....