Wolf at the Door

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!

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.....