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.

Spiralling Out of Control

Just as I suspected, Jeremy Mercer's book Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes was a bit Meh! (how can a book successfully be both self-deprecating and self-regarding at the same time? Dunno, but it is!) but being in Paris, I read it anyway and enjoyed my pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Co. Would that it could have been a longer visit, but it was not to be, for reasons documented in one of my other blogs parablepsis.

Arriving home, I tucked into the remaining chapters of Crime and Punishment and, having finished, scratched my head as to its overall message. Did Raskolnikov really consider himself to be a man apart, above the law and punishment? Was he testing out this theory when he bludgeoned the old pawnbroker and her sister, or was he intent on digging himself out of debt and providing for his studies so that he could help mankind? Was he just deranged? Sick (he spent a lot of time in delirium)? Laden with moral qualms or totally amoral? He seemed to dance around the possibilities in turn, without settling on an answer, and his decision to hand himself in to the police (when he patently didn't feel guilty and had the opportunity to totally get away with the crime) was bizarre and in the end seemed to have less to do with the flaky transparent Sonya than his own perverse nature. He didn't actually seem sorry he committed murder. Naturally he hated Siberia, and seemed to hate the faithful girl who tagged along with him. Nasty piece of work.
I was in the Oxfam shop the other day and stumbled across the second part of Karen Armstrong's autobiography The Spiral Staircase that documents her difficulty in re-engaging with the world on leaving the convent that she had entered aged just seventeen and the various trials (suspected mental health problems) that she underwent before being finally diagnosed as an epileptic. She is one of my favourite biblical scholars (her work is a model of clarity and interesting insight) and I was vaguely aware that she had been in holy orders, but unaware of the whole story, or what she had been through. It is fascinating, and I recognise much of what she writes about (especially the ordeal of producing a doctoral thesis - the descrition of its failure at viva stage is gut-churning to read) and I have ordered online her Through the Narrow Gate to pad out her past as a nun. I picked up The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley, also from the Oxfam theological book shelf. I've been looking for a copy of this out-of-print book for ages, having heard it nominated as the 'best travel book of all time' and appearing to have a bit in common with Sisters of Sinai, which I read with interest last year. Happily it's just the sort of weather (wet, cold and windy) to snuggle up with a book. Since the Husband and Bright-Eyed Boy are out tonight, I shall do just that!

Sur le Continent

Looking forward to our trip to Paris via the Eurostar: just got fingers crossed that the industrial action against the proposed retirement age doesn't obstruct us too much!
To that end I have bought Jeremy Mercer's Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes set in Paris's legendary Shakespeare & Co. book shop. If I'm honest, I'm not expecting too much from it, just a warm, fuzzy, French sort of ambiance. I don't think it'll last me so I'm taking the Husband's copy of Neither Here nor There: travels in Europeby Bill Bryson, which had me crying with laughter (a rare occurrence) when I read a snippet on parking in Rome. The Husband is just moving on to BB's A Walk in the Wood which is good holiday fare. Daughter #3 has finished The Bell Jar so I got a copy of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle which provides a good contrast with Plath's angsty novel, a real feel-good book. the Bright-Eyed Boy still really hasn't found his comfort-level bookwise. Having tried Darren Shan's Demonata series, he still seems to prefer fact-based books and has made a diversion into Jeremy Clarkson and, most recently, Charlie Booker's Screen Burn. I guess he'll come round to literature-proper in the end - the important thing is to keep on reading.

I've gone a bit crazy on Amazon recently, purchasing a lot of commentaries and scholarly stuff for my studies. Most don't really rate a mention, but one that does - on account of its sheer loveliness is the third edition of Michael Holmes' Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. It's been produced in the style of a Bible, with leather-cloth cover and onion-skin paper and is a quite delightful thing to possess. As luck would have it, it arrived just as I needed to look up Clement of Rome's familiarity with the Corinthian correspondence, so out of the packet and onto the desk.
I'm currently making my way slowly through Crime and Punishment and, although I occasionally skim over a page or so, I'm actually rather enjoying it - if that's the word. It's quite uncompromisingly brutal in places and reveals well the psychological agonies of a sick mind. But what I could really do with is a glossary of characters and names - you lose track eventually as the cast increases in number, and even share patronymics!

The Idiot and a Potentially Evil (Buying) Eye

The close of one of my thesis chapters means the opening of another: another text to pull apart and examine with an eye on the grammatical issues that constitute my PhD. One of the comments that my supervisor made was that I 'didn't seem to use many commentaries'. Well, that's true, because (a) I wanted the ideas that came out of my writing to be mine and not some rewarmed opinions of another and (b) most of the ones I have to hand are quite elderly and (literally) fusty. I am quite pernickety when it comes to commentaries - I have to be, as it MUST nod towards the Greek text. Some are much better than others: the old International Critical Commentary series is superb, and I have been lucky enough to pick up a number of these from my local theological second-hand bookshop (The Barbican Bookshop in York).
They do look rather wonderful and serious on the bookshelf (uniformly dark green with gold titles) and are a tribute to the 'steeped-in-learning scholarship' of the late 19th/early 20th century. I also have Bishop Lightfoot's 19th century commentaries on the Pauline epistles - it's a real pity he didn't complete the set - which are a bedrock of any serious textual work, often referred back to in the ICC books. I've borrowed a few from the uni. library too. I don't have much time for the overtly devotional commentaries whose only intent is to bedazzle the faithful with praising and the party-line (mostly American, evangelical and conservative) without bothering to pick up on the serious historical and critical issues......let's be frank, PROBLEMS, belittering the texts.

Confronted by the need to update my academic wardrobe, er, bookshelf, I bit the bullet and bought the volumes in the New International Commentary on the New Testament that deal with the 'authentic' Pauline epistles. They cost a fair bit, but now my commentary work has been dragged into the late 1990's rather than the 1890's, and in truth, that's what my bursary money is for. They are the product of some serious scholarship and although you do glimpse the occasional flash of devotional petticoat, the detailed attention to the Greek text is exemplary.
Trouble is, I am running out of shelf-space - again! I may have to sell some of my old Classics stuff.

Tackling a new epistle is rather daunting, so I was going to spend a week boning up on the Corinthian background (revisiting some stuff tackled in my final undergrad year), but on reading introductory material to 2 Corinthians, I realise that this is going to be no walk in the park: the Greek text looks like a bag of spanners, like someone has dropped a stack of papers on the way to the Xerox, picked them up and duplicated them without regard for order or coherence.
Oh dear! I've certainly got my work cut out!

The Husband is s-l-o-w-l-y making his way through the latest Bill Bryson (he can't seem to stay awake for more than two pages per night). I've just finished Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney, a fictional account of the relationship between Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) and his 'patrons' the Thrale family, as recounted by the oldest daughter Hester (or Queeney as she is known to differentiate her from her mother). I really enjoyed it and will keep an eye out for more Bainbridges in the charity shops.
I've moved onto Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, partly because Daughter #1 recommended The Idiot to me (although I think she's stopped reading it now for some reason). Serious Russian literature is a bit of a lacuna for me, although I did actually read War and Peace once (meandering and quite dull, I seem to remember) and 'enjoyed' Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I didn't actually get that the former was a satire on Communism). I am quite surprised at how easy C & P is to read - kudos to the translator - but sometimes I find the narrative arc of older literature unsatisfying and I end up scratching my head as to what's supposed to have happened. Or stop caring if it's too digressive. We'll see.

However, the point of this post was that I bought the Bainbridge book as a result of seeing a documentary on her fascinating and eccentric life: she had died just a week or so before. Daughter #1 was very impressed by the job the translator (Alan Myers) had done on The Idiot (I was looking out for a C & P by him), but I found myself reading his obituary in the papers within the same week.
More spookily, I ordered, through AbeBooks, a 2-volume set of Margaret Thrall's ('magisterial') commentary on 2 Corinthians and.......no sooner had I submitted my order than I read on a theological website that she had just died! Perhaps I should lay off buying stuff for a while!

A Miscellany of Books

Hmm....so what exactly have I been reading lately? Well, I finished off Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna and enjoyed it very much indeed. I would have said 'immensely', but I thought the latter third was a bit too fragmented to qualify for that. Still, it was good enough that I ordered The Poisonwood Bible from the web for less than charity shop price (£2.76), although I haven't started it yet.
The visit of Pope Benedict to the UK inspired me to buy the biography written by Rupert Shortt - I didn't quite manage to read it in its entirety while he was here (which was my intention) but still managed it pretty swiftly and it was very good - although not quite up to date with the latest events - but it did only cost 1p (plus p&p).
Another book that spans the divide between my academic and personal interests is Diarmaid McCulloch's tome The History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years which is a monster paperback that's going to take some getting through! A small section at a time, I think. Bart Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted was another purchase and although it's interesting, it's not the earth-shattering work I think he thinks it is. At least, not to me with my background in textual criticism.
The Husband, making his way slowly through Bill Bryson's book on small-town America The Lost Continent got a rude awakening when it was recalled by the library for another borrower, having already clocked up a fine, and has had to settle down with another Bryson offering: Neither Here Nor There: A Journey Around Europe which should probably hit the spot.
Daughter #3 having read and enjoyed Long Ago and Essentially True has started on a charity shop edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which was one of my personal teenage favourite reads. Everyone who reads it thinks that they're Esther.
I've also managed to purchase a number of academic books for my studies, the most interesting of which were a very lovely Douay-Rheims/Vulgata Clementina, which looks like a proper Bible and a print to order copy of the Septuagint (the Old Testament in Greek translation), which smells rather pleasantly of fresh ink and a tiny gold-edged, clasp-bound prayer book called The Key of Heaven: A Manual of Prayer for the Use of the Faithful, which has a picture of St Therese of Lisieux (her feast day today!) on the front and a crucifix concealed in a compartment within the front cover. It is very pretty, rather worn, and has obviously been used and loved well. I shall continue to love it and use it too.

The Very Last of Summer

Well, the summer's technically over, the kids are back at school and Monday will see me nose down in my doctoral stuff again. I've had a tremendous time reading purely for pleasure over the 'holidays' and can't say that I'm really relishing a return to the dry prose of academia.
I followed The Elegance of the Hedgehog with Zafon's The Angel's Game, which I thought was a lot better than his Shadow of the Wind. It was a gripping page-turner, somewhat overblown in style (although I'd got into his idiom by then), with aspirations to be far more grand guignol than it actually is. A good summer read.

I then polished off The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and although I thought it was an excellent conceit (narrated by the omniscient and surprisingly compassionate figure of death), I didn't think it was quite as good as I'd been led to believe. The characters were a little too wooden and uninvolving to provoke empathy ,and some (like the foster-mother and Max), didn't quite work for me. I had the sneaking suspicion that the author thought that the situation would be sufficient to arouse compassion and emotion, but the overall effect was strangely distancing. I also couldn't quite decide who it was aimed at (not that that is important in the long run): the older child-reader or adults? The format (bite size chapters, explanations and large-ish font-size) heavily suggested the former, but the scope and ambition seemed to flag up an older audience. Enjoyable enough, but not really thought-provoking or engaging.

My last book of the summer has turned out to be Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which will last me a while, I think. As soon as I opened it up, I realised that the writing in this novel is streets ahead of anything else that I have read recently. It's superbly well-written, which came as a refreshing change (probably because she writes in English and hasn't had to undergo some half-arsed translation process). The story is a slow burner, and none the worse for that - one of the gripes I had with Zafon was, in fact, the ridiculously fast pace at which characters fell in love for life, or situations evolved and were resolved. I am enjoying The Lacuna immensely at the moment, and intend to seek out her earlier work The Poisonwood Bible as and when I finish this one off, which - given my imminent return to study - may be some time!

Shadow of the Hedgehog

The holidays are receding rapidly into the past (sadly) as are the memories of the books I took with me, so I had better make some notes whilst I remember!

I broke off in the middle of Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, there being so few pages left that it wasn't really worth taking away with me. I read some of his collected short stories on the outbound plane - that is, when I could read: the two and three year-olds sitting behind me were totally undisciplined by their parents and spent the entire journey kicking the back of my seat and catching my hair as they grabbed onto the top of it. Not conducive to concentration! I did manage a few stories though, which were a fairly engrossing representation of a particular echelon of society at a particular time in history.

We spent less time just lazing about this year, so I didn't read as much as I did last year, but it didn't take me long to dispatch Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions. It was a warm, fuzzy holiday read, as are all his works, but the new cast of characters aren't sufficiently well-defined in my head to warm to yet. Additionally, there seems to be some overlap between characters in this latest offering and the Isabel Dalhousie series: another older lady caught in an unexpected romance with a beautiful youth? I also kept getting mixed up between the young men in the book....they're all so unbelievably sensitive and in touch with their inner selves!

I started on Dan Simmons' Children of the Night, but the setting was so dark and bleak (post-Ceaucescu Romania) that it was not consonant with the holiday mood and I once more retreated to dip into the brittle world of Waugh.

On my return home I polished off Gilbert Pinfold and moved rapidly on to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, which I'd picked up in a Waterstones' three-for-two offer. It would actually have been the ideal book to take on our city-break last autumn, set as it is in the very city we visited, Barcelona.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I've read a lot of reviews on it since finishing it (to have read them before would have prejudiced me, I feel) and find myself agreeing with most of the views expressed. The characters - particularly the female ones - are thinly padded stereotypes, the protagonist, Daniel, seems colourless and unsympathetic. The character that some reviewers enthused most about (and an equal number hated), Fermin, I found to be a highly irritating caricature of a lecherous cod-philosopher who - if I were Daniel - I'd have dropped quicker than a hot potato. Or punched into unconsciousness and silence. The way Fermin was accepted (and this in the paranoid post-civil war Spain) by the father without murmur or question into the family business was incredible. The 'evil nemesis', the police chief Javier Fumero, was a cartoon villain, who apparently 'giggled'. Indeed, quite often the translation let the book down, with the translator seeming to prefer formal rather than dynamic equivalence, which led to stilted, unbelievable or tortuous phrases. The plotting was confusing, and the lack of colour and differentiation between characters meant that I if my concentration lapsed (as it does if one is tired), I became unsure as to which time-thread I was reading (Daniel/Julian, Penelope/Bea/Nuria).

However, having said all this and despite its faults I actually thoroughly enjoyed the book in the same way that I enjoyed The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, and found myself looking forward to picking it up and reading it at the beginning and end of each day. What better recommendation is there? It had sufficient atmosphere to immerse the reader in the city, and I felt that this was where this book triumphed, rather than in its characters. It is a good, holiday season book, and I am actively looking forward to reading another of Zafon's books, The Angel's Game, which is similarly set in Barca.

After the Shadow of the Wind, I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by the French author Muriel Barbery, whom I'd never heard of until I spotted this. Opinions are sharply divided on this book too, people either loving it or hating it in equal numbers, calling it either profound or pretentious. The conceit, that of an socially and emotionally stunted concierge who hides a sensitive, intellectual side behind a drab exterior is quite intriguing if somewhat unbelievable - who'd really have a TV set playing game shows to fool the residents into thinking that one is really dumb? Would it really be worth the effort to buy bland foods to kid the neighbourhood that one had plebian tastes? The characterisation (mostly of unpleasant or deficient people) is satisfyingly well done. For my liking, Renee surrenders her mask somewhat too easily during the course of the book, but the surprising denouement literally had me in tears reflecting that, at the moment of death, our thoughts must inevitably turn to those who we are leaving behind, and to the second death of those loved ones who are kept alive only in the memory of the dying person. I'm not sure what message the author intends to impart. There seems to be a divide: that a person can only blossom in the company of a like-minded soul (and we get glimpses of Renee's ultimate potential in the company of her friend Manuela), and that beauty can only really be appreciated at the moment of its passing. A bit like life, I suppose.