A Kindled Cure

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!

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.

A Bit of a Lull

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

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.