Springing into Action

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!!!

Order and Chaos

I've finished off Sean Martin's book on the Templars, and very edifying it was too. I think that I am quite convinced by the theory that the Templars adopted Switzerland as their ordensland and sank thier much-discussed wealth into banks there. It would explain much.
Saturday saw me mooching around Waterstones (RIP Borders) and becoming quite annoyed by their categorization system. The biography section was full of misery-lit which, as many of them are highly questionable if not totally fictitious accounts makes you wonder whether they should be on a shelf of their own. The 'body mind and spirit' section which incorporates 'popular psychology' is filled with complete twaddle including tarot reading sets. I was looking for Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which I failed to find, although some other books of his (The Stuff of Thought and How the Mind Works) were in the popular science section. What I did find, however, was Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, which I seized eagerly as an adjunct to my current studies and, along with Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus, made my foray into the store eventually tolerable.
As this Waterstone's doesn't have an in-store coffee shop, I had to haul my prizes to the new Cafe Nero so that I could have a quick scan of them with a cup of coffee. I used to spend a lot of time in the old Nero when I was doing my OU courses, and in those days it was actually still possible to have a smoke along with your latte. How intellectual I felt with my books and pencils and a Gauloises roll-up to hand! No more though: thanks nanny state! I'm so glad you've determined what's best for me!

The book-buying slump seems to have passed, thank goodness, and I'm currently waiting for a copy of The Romans Debate by Karl P. Donfried to arrive from The Book Depository. This volume consists of a number of essays on Paul's letter to the Romans including the reason for his letter, which is far from settled. On the way back home I popped into our local charity shop and picked up a couple of bargains: The QI Book of General Ignorance (a genre currently much favoured by the Bright-Eyed Boy) and a Templar novel Order in Chaos (ostensibly for my mother), but which turned out to be the third in a trilogy. Guess I'm going to have to find the other two first! Doh!

January Inertia

I am seized by a torpor that even extends to the book-buying department, which means that, as torpor goes, it's a pretty serious seizure,
Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal was thoroughly enlightening an entertaining, especially the amusing analogy used to try and explain Noam Chomsky's shifting views on the innateness of language (as explained to the Emperor of Jupiter), Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes has been duly passed on to Mother, who has found it a welcome distraction during some dark and difficult days and nights. George Steiner's After Babel is sitting on the 'to-be-read' pile, and the bargainous second-hand copy of Wallace Chafe's Meaning and the Structure of Language has a ridiculously stiff cover that means it keeps trying to close itself up when I'm trying to read it. Following on from a recent TV documentary I sent off for a copy of Sean Martin's The Knights Templar, which is a lot more scholarly than I'd expected from his appearance on it (I think it was the big earring that suggested this....). I'm going to try not to get sucked down the whole Templar treasure route, entailing as it does D*n Br*wn and books of That Sort, but it is an intriguing question: when Philip the Fourth of France finally accessed the Templar coffers (having wiped the Order out of existence) and found them empty, where had the money gone? Martin is convinced that the Templars, sensing the end was nigh, had ample opportunity and means to disperse the treasure during the time that the Templar leaders were imprisoned in Paris.
I'm going through one of my periodic reading slumps at the moment , but with Borders gone and Waterstones lacking in browsing appeal (too many celeb biographies or celeb chef cookbooks on display) and not knowing what it is that I fancy reading, I guess I'm going to have to sit slack-jawed in front of the telly a bit more until thoroughly cheesed off with what's on offer. Actually, there was rather a good documentary on last night called Aristotle's Lagoon, which dealt with Aristotle's 'forgotten' natural history masterpiece Historia Animalium. Forgotten? I think not. His understanding of biology informs much of the Aristotelean corpus, and it's one of the first things we studied at uni. It also contains some of the interesting pieces of translation that the Bright-Eyed Boy and I looked at a while ago. The Lesvos scenery was lovely and the presenter charming and enthusiastic, but my main criticism of the whole programme, fascinating as it was, was that it contained no passages from Aristotle's works, and that is a bit of a shame as they are well-observed and occasionally amusing. Aristotle likened a seal to 'lame quadruped'; noted that 'some folk have heard snoring coming out' of a sleeping dolphin's blowhole; that small, round stripey bees are the 'best' sort, with the long bee, the 'thief' bee and the big lazy stingless bee lagging behind; that no living creature 'casts' its back teeth, but dogs lose none at all according to some people and only the canines according to others....Fortunately I'd recorded it, because the lovely scenery, soothing commentary and two glasses of red wine meant that I'd fallen asleep shortly before the end.....

New Year, New Books

The New Year post has brought me a copy of Jean Aitchison's The Articulate Mammal, an introduction to psycholinguistics that is at once highly readable and knowledgeable. It's one of those fascinating books that makes you turn to your spouse as you sit up reading in bed and say 'Well, I never knew that.....', it's full of insights and supplies an excellent overview of the development of the discipline.
A friend of mine has lent me her copy of Harry Thompson's novel This Thing of Darkness, which she rated as her absolutely best read of 2009. It was longlisted for the 2005 Booker prize and sadly the author died only a year later. I've read several reviews of it and they are all equally laudatory, and having started it over the Christmas holidays, it's starting to grow on me. I was initially put off by the '40 years before the mast' detail, which seemed reminiscent of a Patrick O'Brien tale, all poopdecks and marlin spikes, but the quality of the writing is undeniable. I shall persist with it. Boswell's Life of Johnson, although excellent, can tend towards same-iness if read in too large a chunk.
The AHRC funding has happily allowed me to order a couple of books for my studies: George Steiner's After Babel, and another Wallace Chafe book, the Meaning and Structure of Language, both of which I am hoping will provide additional grist for the linguistic doctoral mill. My mother, who has become very interested in the subject of the Crusades, will additionally receive Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, in the interests of maintaining a balanced, scholarly approach.
Hopefully, the severe wintery weather will not delay their delivery by too much

Christmas Passed

Got NO books for Christmas this year, but fair enough - I didn't ask for any!

My Christmas reading matter tends to be on the light side (to give myself a break, and to be capable of being absorbed after a heavy night) and this year I am progressing nicely through The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart. It is a very pleasant, undemanding frothy confection in the style of Chocolat, passed onto me by Daughter #1 who likes to de-stress on her train journey home from the Inns of Court.

I still haven't had a chance to look at my new Greek-English New Testament, but I am saving that...I have bought a lovely suade book-jacket for it, which smells just wonderful!

Now that the York Borders store has finally closed, there won't be any spending of my Christmas money there (obviously): Waterstones may get a grudging look-in, but I'll probably get most of my stuff online from now on (except novels - I'll try to source them from charity shops or borrow them from the library).

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.

The Desert Fathers.....redux

OK, as promised, a couple of passages from the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) [Penguin Classics] demonstrating that they definitely took asceticism, self-denial and punishment far too seriously, warping every natural human instinct, behaviour and desire into monstrous and entirely selfish aberrations:

'A brother was leaving the world, and though he gave his goods to the poor he kept some for his own use. He went to Antony, and when Antony knew what he had done, he said, 'If you want to be a monk, go to the village over there, buy some meat, hang it on your naked body and come back here.' The brother went, and dogs and birds tore at his body. He came back to Antony, who asked him if he had done what he was told. He showed him his torn body. Then Antony said, 'Those who renounce the world but want to keep their money are attacked in that same way by demons and torn in pieces.'

'Once one of the hermits lay gravely ill, and was loosing a lot of blood from his bowels. A brother brought him some dried fruit and stewed it, and offered it to him saying, 'Eat; perhaps it will do you good.' The hermit looked at him for a long time, and said, 'I want you to know that I wish God would leave me my sickness for thirty years more.' In his weakness he absolutely refused to take even a little food; so the brother took away what he had brought, and returned to his cell.'

'Once a brother went to visit his sister who was ill in a nunnery. She was someone of great faith. She herself had never agreed to see a man nor did she want to give her brother occasion for coming into the company of women. She commanded him, 'Go away, brother, and pray for me, for by God's grace I shall see you in the kingdom of heaven.''