Christmas Joy!

Oh joy! The post-woman has just delivered two eagerly awaited volumes from the Book Depository which I am just about to unwrap as you read this: No1, in a jiffy bag (no sniggering now, you North Americans!) is Thought and Language, a revised and enlarged edition of Lev Vygotsky's seminal work that I have decided is utterly necessary to my doctoral studies and , along with Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness will be the touchstones of my thesis. The second (pause to fetch scissors for the altogether more serious cardboard wrapping and shrink-wrap) is a beautiful burgundy Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament with full apparatus criticus! I am running my hands over it appreciatively and feel the urge to kiss it.

Not that I am actually short of Greek New Testaments, you understand, as you might expect for someone in my field. The count up to present include my workhorse NA27 (complete with apparatus criticus, blue, underlined and well-thumbed) that I've had since my undergrad days with Keith Elliott, a UBS 3rd edition with app.crit. and dictionary, a UBS 4th edition Reader's New Testament with gloss, both burgundy too, a small, black Englishman's New Testament (1877, interlinear literal, plus KJV translation around the margins, the font almost too small for my poor old eyes to read), a British and Foreign Bible Society 1931 NT, a 1907 diglot Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and and interlinear with parallel KJV and NIV texts. So I guess you could say that I collect them,but the thrill of opening up a brand new, pristine text is unsurpassable. It's my Christmas present to myself.

Cosmological Schemata......and Book Mysteries

Strangely, I received an email from Amazon yesterday asking me to rate my transaction 'Sisters of Sinai'......as I had not received anything from them and was unsure as to the status of my order (see earlier post), I immediately went online and noted that that order appeared to be dead. Somewhat irritated, I logged on to The Book Depository and promptly ordered a copy from them. Hopefully it will arrive before too long - the BD are usually pretty good. Still, I originally ordered it from the BD through the agency of Amazon at £14.39: I am paying £15.64 to get it direct from the BD! If I had known that I would have had to wait, I would have gone directly to the BD in the first place!!! And will do in the future.

Whilst we were away in Venice, I managed to miss a programme on the BBC called 'The Narnia Code'. The other night, I caught up with it on BBC iPlayer (what a useful asset that is!) Whilst the programme was, in effect, a huge plug for Dr Michael Ward's book 'Planet Narnia' (not that I have a problem with that - it's wonderful when someone's PhD research is truly commercially viable), it laid out the intriguing notion that the seven chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis contained symbolism found within medieval cosmological theory. Apparently the idea came to Dr Ward late one night when he was reading one of Lewis's poems containing a couple of lines that referred to the imagined attributes of Jupiter, and it immediately struck him that those lines summed up, in a nutshell, the plot of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'.

Excited by his insight, he examined the qualities of the other members of the medieval cosmic hierarchy - the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars and saturn - and discovered that the writing contained in the other six Narnia books was indeed richly symbolic of those heavenly bodies. It was all a bit of a tease though: we found out that, for example, 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' alluded to 'Sol' - the sun, with its imagery of dawns, dragons and the eastern horizon, and that 'The Silver Chair', where the prince is thought to be a lunatic, is the 'Luna' or 'moon book'. 'Prince Caspian', with its themes of war, is the 'Mars book', who was also imagined to be the deity connected with woods and forests, hence the emphasis on the tree symbolism in that volume. I would have been fascinated to find out more and it was hinted that the theory was fully extrapolated....in the book! Grrr! Something else I'll just have to buy.....

It did occur to me, as it obviously did to the makers of the programme, that Holst's 'Planet' suite (used as a soundtrack) fits quite nicely alongside Dr Ward's theory, but maybe that, too, is tackled in the book.

**update: received an email from the Book Depository telling me that my order couldn't be fulfilled and so they were refunding my money. So why in Sam Hill wasn't the book flagged up as 'out-of-stock' when I placed my order? Oooooh!!!**

So of course I ended up not buying a modern first edition for my new god-son. I stayed traditional and he ended up with a RSV-CE New Testament and Psalms, which is good and clear but not too trendy. Doubtless he will never even look at it, but it's there if he wants to.

Another week of prolific book buying: I have been looking for ages for a 'How To...' book on doing a PhD and blow me if two don't come along at once! Browsing in Borders whilst the pregnant daughter availed herself of the toilet facilities, I came across a couple of OU publications, 'How to Write a Thesis' and 'The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research'. Only the former was priced - at £17.99!!! Recognising that buying both would be impossible, I took the latter (unpriced) to the check-out where I was informed that it -although slimmer - was £18.99. Laughing hollowly I told them that as far as I was concerned, they could...er...reshelve it.

Doctoral studies means that my book buying has been cranked up a notch. A rather expensive notch at that. Some books are just so useful or seminal that it is practically mandatory to possess one's own copy. Thus it was with Albert Rijksbaron's 'The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek' and Constantine Campbell's hotly debated 'Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek', purchased from The Book Depository through Amazon, rather than directly from the former. Likewise my mother who wanted to buy me a 'useful' book for Christmas (i.e. one that I will actually use) found herself unable even to order the Loeb second volume of Epictetus from Borders, garnering nothing but a gormless smile from the unfortunate girl behind the information desk. God knows what antiquated data base they use. I was left to source the book online (again from the BD via Amazon - a bit cheaper than buying direct from BD strangely, even including the added on P&P). Whilst on the web I also ordered the two OU publications at £5 less each than the shop price. So - oh joy!- five books plopped through my letter box this week, one of which I am passing on to be wrapped and returned on Christmas Eve *rolls eyes*.

Oh, and by-the-by I bought a holiday reading book too: the Wordsworth Press's edition of Thomas Hardy's 'The Well-Beloved'. I thought that I had read all Hardy's works when expecting child #3, but this one seems to have escaped me. At £1.99, an absolute bargain. I look forward to waking early on the Christmas morns in order to read before the family awakes.