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!!!
