A Chance Find

The glorious sunshine yesterday propelled me into town yesterday, ostensibly to source a copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon for daughter #3, who is finding the endless vampire-fare supplied by the school library beyond a joke. She is mature for her age and has outgrown the standard parallel worlds/fantasy stuff written for her age-group, so I suggested that she might like to move more into adult fiction. She has enjoyed some of Neil Gaiman's work (although, interestingly, didn't much care for The Graveyard Book which was written with a younger audience in mind) and I think will like Sarah Walter's Little Stranger when the husband has finished with it*. It occurred to me that Curious Incident bridges the divide quite nicely and decided that I'd try to source a second-hand one from a charity shop. But, as I found last year with Foucault's Pendulum, although they are on the shelves in abundance when you're just browsing, they seem to absent themselves when being sought exclusively!

I found myself up Micklegate at the Oxfam bookshop (where, at last, there was one indeed) and decided to go a bit further up the hill to Ken Spelman's marvellous book emporium. The open fire glowed in the hearth and I trotted up the rickety stair to the Classics section. They must have had a new delivery of books because the first thing that caught my eye was a 19th century diglot version of the Sybylline Oracles, bound in leather. It was only a little over £10, so I picked it up - and then saw a Loeb edition of Herodian (although only the first volume) and I added that to the pile. Wandering over to the medieval section I found a Penguin Classics copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise....and then one of The Lives of the Saints. As the last two were only £1 each, I felt no jabs on conscience whatsoever, and the Herodian was cheap for a Loeb and would boost my 'collection'. There is something akin to a chemical hit in such serendipity and I couldn't wait to get to a coffee shop and unwrap the books, beautifully packaged as usual, in crisp dark green paper.....

* ....in fact the Dog, obviously bored, finished it (off) before he did. Curling up on the bed she literally devoured the first quarter of the book. Fortunately the Husband had already read beyond the destroyed portion, but its rather tattered and bloodied pages means that he can't whip it out on the train!!!

Metamorphosis I am Hoping for, not Dereliction.

I am rather sad at the demise of Borders bookshops as I have spent a lot of time (and money) browsing their shelves and drinking coffee in the in-store Starbucks of the York branch. It's rather unusual in that the back half of the building was originally a chapel, and the cafe area occupies the gallery that runs around the four walls in a squared-off oval.

Ever since he was very young, the Bright-Eyed Boy and I have spent many a happy hour peering over the handrail and playing our favourite game of 'Book Spotting' with a coffee/bun to hand. This consists of one party naming a book that they can see on the shelves on the floor below, which the other party has to locate and describe. Good for both observation and verbal skills, although we just enjoy it. We went to have a possibly final cup of coffee there today, but sadly found that the coffee-shop was shut for a staff meeting. I hope we manage to fit one more in before the doors shut forever. As a venue, it really does hold many fond memories for me and I hope that the building isn't going to be turned into yet another crappy cheap clothes shop. In truth, I guess I am partly to blame for the chain's demise. Although I have bought a lot of books from them in my time, in many instances the limits of stock, the esoteric nature of my wants, or simply cost, have driven me into the arms of online retailers. Which is where a lot of Borders' clientele have ended up, I suspect.
Mea culpa, Borders.
When I was browsing in town on Saturday, whilst waiting for daughter #3 to do her rowing training (in the boathouse gym, as the river has well and truly burst its banks) I went to a favourite antiquarian book shop, Ken Spelmans on Micklegate. This is absolutely lovely, smells just right (ever so slightly musty), is suitably poky and has an open coal-fire glowing in the back room. Up the rickety stairs there is a modest theology and classics section (always a few Loebs to be had) where I chanced upon a wonderful leather-bound copy of Donnegan's Greek/English Dictionary dating from 1837. I was severely tempted, but as it was a tome of considerable avoir du pois and I had only just started my two-hours' browsing, I regretfully put it back. However, when I thought about it over the rest of the weekend, I developed a terrible hankering for it (small Greek font has a strange effect on me). Monday (a teacher-training day) saw the boy and I legging back up the hill to snatch it gleefully of the shelf. I had previously told myself that it would probably have been bought (to guard against disappointment) but when I saw that it hadn't - well, it was like a real chemical 'hit'. The nice thing about Spelmans is that they wrap your purchases up in green parcel paper, so you feel like Mr Brownlow or some other Dickensian character as you walk out of the shop.
I have to admit to taking advantage of the 20% off sign in Borders and bought Alexander McCall-Smith's The Comfort of Saturdays, a Penguin Classics copy of Selections from the Talmud and an Oxford Classics version of Kafka's short stories. I whipped through the first in no time at all (and for a while found myself thinking in a similar fashion to Isabel Dalhousie: wistfully philosophic) and am dipping in and out of the second. I will read the third in dribs and drabs, as Kafka is far too weird to read a lot of in one go. We've been reading some portions of untranslated Kafka in the German Reading Skills classes and he is a most unsettling author. Nothing is comfortable or predictable. All is alienation and rejection. I remember borrowing Metamorphosis and other stories from the library in response to another (similar) author's work. Damned if I can remember who it was now!

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.....