Books Do Furnish A Room

Book of books

I read a long, and largely favourable review (by Arthur Freeman) in the TLS recently of The Oxford Companion to the Book, edited by Michael F Suarez SJ and H R Woudhuysen, but building on contributions by hundreds of experts.  It is not a cheap offering, at a mere £195, but it does offer what sounds to be a fascinating and comprehensive overview of the world of books in its widest sense, covering a monstrous 1,408 pages.

The review covers the volumes very thoroughly, citing excellence and the occasional quibble, and ends:

... this is a very healthy matrix, conceived and executed as well as one could expect from so distinguished a body of collaborators ... it will prove a godsend to challenged librarians, and to teachers of classes on any aspect of "the Book", and a rich lucky dip for the general reader.

I suspect I will not be buying it for myself, though I am surely tempted, but I will certainly be reading large chunks of it when it appears in the London Library. 

Kindle, kindle, little book

Kindle, kindle little book / How I wonder do pages look / Up above the shelf so free / Like cybertext you can see?

 

I've had a Kindle (Amazon's e-reader, for those of you who have been in a library for the past couple of years) for about two months now.  I was persuaded to buy a Kindle, not the Sony reader, because the Sony is small, the pages turn in a way I find visually disrupting, and the Kindle has many more reader-user friendly features, including the ability to download books remotely without a computer.

I've enjoyed it hugely.  It's not like reading a book, and I can't quite imagine curling up on a sofa in front of a roaring fire with my Kindle - and I certainly wouldn't read it in the bath - but the actually experience of reading is very easy on the eye, and you can do lots of things which make it very practical to use:

• You can put in lots of bookmarks
• It knows what page you were on, on every book you have on the go
• You can write marginal notes or excerpt passages
• .. and email them to yourself (for preparing a blog or lesson notes, perhaps)
• It lasts a very long time - 4000 page turns or something like that
• You can read lots of books at the same time

It's not backlit, so the page is easy to read and no strain, and you can vary the typesize to suit you. I found no difficulty for reading two or three hours at a time on journeys, for example. It's light and sleek and easy to carry around, and it can do lots of things a book can't:

• Download periodicals automatically (so on holiday I read The Times each day in the mountains of Peru, and now get the TLS each week)
• Carry dozens of books at a time
• You can get a free trial chapter of a lot of books to try before you buy
• Order and receive new books remotely, in a matter of a minute or two (so, dis-satisfied with guides in Peru, I found and downloaded a book on Inca culture in two minutes on a coach on a mountain road)

Modern best seller type books are cheaper than print versions, but not massively so.  But out of date books can be fantastic value - $2 or $3 for a lot of books, and the same amount for some huge compendia including many, many books - I paid that amount for almost all Rudyard Kipling for example, and the same for dozens of murder mystery short stories and novels - so I'll always have something to read, even if my mood changes from when I packed my bag.  It does have some disadvantages, of course:

• No colour
• The cheaper books have less good internal navigation (though its not really a serious problem)
• Graphics can be small (you can zoom, but a map in a guide book is designed to be seen all at once)
• Papers like The Times don't have the crossword or the bridge column!
• So far, the book collection, though large and growing, is not comprehensive and has a slight US bias - but that is changing already

I am thrilled with my purchase, and will continue to read it regularly.  For me, its ideal as I travel a lot and carrying several books can be cumbersome, and you don't always know what you'll want to read in three days time.  And, to answer Cornflower's question, I don't think it affects your propensity to snooze - the page turning button is, if anything, less strenuous than turning a real page!

Books of 2009

I have not Cornflower’s problems of choice.  It has not been a vintage year for reading, and it is relatively easy to pick the outstanding, though the good have occasionally been very good:

Karen Armstrong's excellent The History of God: not my normal reading country, but full of interest and intellectual excitement, profound without being too technical or demanding of the non-specialist.  Really worthwhile - a tremendous insight to understanding the cultural history of Europe and the Middle East.

Malcolm Gladwell’s What The Dog Saw:  A recent discovery, vital, exciting essays about everyday issues and big questions for society, everyone of them bringing a fresh perspective, new information, and real insight.  A book everyone should read, a real antidote to received wisdom and shoddy sound-bite politicians; certainly an author I shall revisit soon.

Robertson Davies' The Cunning Man:  This under-rated Canadian novelist at his best.  The main character, a doctor, is all humanity, wise, and foolish, understanding and challenging.  He realises that to seek to understand one thing is need to understand all, so body, mind, and spirit are treated as one, in a delicate and complex parable of humanity's need to understand itself yet to decieve itself, too, to manage the simple business of living.

Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go:  Only re-read very recently, this book entranced me again with its melancholy, elegiac grace, as the author mourns the passing of the Master, of an age, and of a little part of himself.  To lose is to die a little.

MacDonald Harriss' The Balloonist:  An unusual, lyrical novel about the exploration of the world by balloon, and of love and lust, ending in gentle, philosophic tragedy.  A new novelist for me, and this was certainly a stimulating first draft.

John Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man:  A tough, exciting thriller of the modern age - set in Hamburg, this throws an old, cynical banking firm into chaos as the senior partner is drawn into corruption scandals from his father's past, finding true love in his first enemy, and suffering loss and humiliation at the hands of his friends.  Not a pretty picture of Bush's America, dealing with global terrorism with a clunking fist and heavy blinkers.  Back to the standard of Le Carré's cold war best.

That is half a dozen.  If you want seven, a more mystical number, I would throw in (with great joy), an idiosyncratic and amusing book about books:

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night:  Not just at night either, but all through history and in your mind.  Essays of sure touch, lightly worn erudition, and lovely insights.  If you read, you will find yourself and all your friends here.

Here's to a fine crop of pages in 2010:  I may start with the oldest of old friends, and revist Anthony Powell, whose Dance To The Music of Time is my traditional New Year fare, usurped in 2009 by C P Snow.

Read, then, if you think you're hard enough

My eye recently caught George Steiner’s On Difficulty and other essays on the shelf recently, and I have had it out to remind myself of some of his ideas.  He is a wonderfully stimulating essayist and speaker but I have not picked up the Steiner at all readily, mainly because he is – in an irony he would both have appreciated and protested about – very “difficult”.

We often say that modern music, modern poetry, modern painting is “difficult”, and it’s not always easy to grasp what we mean.  Often, we may mean no more than that they make us think, rather than taking us on an automatic, semi-anaesthetised journey.  Nick Jenkins’ father famously objected to books which made him think, a precept from which his son, and his son’s creator, can have taken little comfort.  Sometimes, we mean that they touch on complex questions which have no clear answers, and are ambiguous or incomplete – or that we do not like facing certain morally or judicially ambiguous challenges.  Sometimes, we mean that we do not have the intellectual equipment to understand – that we are not clever enough, or more likely, that we do not speak the language well enough, or cannot understand all the author’s references – a common concern for the young reader, or for any modern reader, of books which demand a working knowledge of a certain (admittedly restricted) canon of western thought and literature, including most obviously the Bible, Shakespeare and the classical authors.

But some difficulty is temperamental: we find it difficult to accept that a poem or a painting operates abstractly, merely because we are used to them acting literally and descriptively.  We do not complain that music or architecture or textile design or a piece of ceramic is abstract, that there is no narrative or no representation of the world.  So why cannot a painting or a poem be like that too?

Steiner distinguishes several types of difficulty, some flowing from the world, some from the author, and some from the reader.  I was particularly interested in his suggestion that difficulty may arise because the writer is forging a new language, or forcing words to mean things they have not meant before.  I think this is frequent in modern authors, but if they are successful, it may become easier to later audiences.  Contrariwise, some concepts which are easy to one generation may be hard for another: can we really understand the chivalric code of love, for example, or the exaggerated sense of personal honour of the insult and the duel?

Eliot says somewhere that in the modern age, all poetry must be difficult.  This is clearly not true at one level -  easy poetry can still be written – but I think he meant that poetry ought to be tackling the hardest, most difficult questions, and that (as he thought) language and culture were being debased and near collapse: so the challenge is to capture ever more demanding ideas with language the writer finds increasingly inadequate.  He captured this, in his own writing, about his own writing, in East Coker:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

This is a long way from Steiner. But I do recommend the essays, especially On Difficulty itself, The Distribution of Discourse, and After the Book?  This last is particularly fascinating: written in 1972, it is worried not about the rise of digital media, as we would expect the same title to be now, but about a decline in the social and intellectual status of the book.  But he is always realistic:

... it is worth stressing that the book has been a significant phenomenon only in certain areas and cultures, and during a relatively short span of history.  Being bookmen, we tend to forget the extremely special locale and circumstances of our addiction.

Read Steiner: enjoy, be amazed, and wonder at his expertise and his insight.  But don’t expect it to be easy!

T S Eliot, publisher

On a recent Sunday morning, to the TS Eliot exhibition at the British Library.  It's small, but very good, focusing on his work as a publisher, supporting poets such as MacNeice, Spender, Ted Hughes and many others, and the exhibition consists mostly of letters and photographs, with one or two interesting recordings.  Sadly, it finishes on 6 December, so it's almost too late to see it now.  But it's was a fascinating insight into his work as a director at Faber & Faber (there was only one Faber, but he thought two sounded better!).  His fellow directors were well aware of his value to the company, as author, icon and talent speaker, but they were not in awe of him, as this heading from an alphabetical catalogue shows:

E is for Eliot, a very stern man.

His prose is severe, and his poems don't scan.

But many of those younger writers that he brought to the company were very much overawed, including Ted Hughes.  He said meeting Eliot, a quiet and slightly stiff persona, was like watching the Queen Mary bear down on you, very slowly.  Eliot wrote a lot of letters himself, and both manuscripts and typescripts exist, exhorting this poet or that to greater efforts, or recommending that the firm take someone up.  One of his great contacts, of course, was Auden, who took the mickey about some of the people Eliot met when doing lecture tours in the US:

T S Eliot is quite at a loss

When clubwomen hustle across

 At literary teas

 And say: "What if you please

Do you mean by A Mill On The Floss"?

As well as letters and pictures, there were many recordings to enjoy as well - the great man himself, reading from his own poetry, (you can him ploughing through the wonderful Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock here) and Ted Hughes reading Hawk in the Rain, and Auden reading As I Walked Out One Evening.  One prose writer he enouraged was Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood you will probably know, but I confess I didn't.  All in all, a rewarding hour with an unsung side of the greatest poet in English of the past hundred years.

Books in the dark

Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is one of those books which looks as if it will be really interesting when you get around to reading it – bit it looks quite serious, and in the meantime, there’s a tense thriller or a weepy novelette to tempt you away.  While, after several months, I ceased to be tempted away recently, and opened the Manguel in earnest, starting with a description of his own library in a medieval barn in the Loire valley.

It’s clearly a book to read in instalments, and I shall pick it up from time to time when in Dorset, where I have left it.  But the first essay – The Library at Night – has an interesting observation: that during the day, Manguel is in charge, is orderly, productive, sequacious of learning and successful in finding the books and references he needs.  But at night, the library is in charge – Manguel is lead astray, ideas coming from the books themselves, producing a chaos and litter of meaning only half understood, of books in the wrong places, of time expended without progress.  Maybe this is why Montaigne famously did not venture in his library after dark, though I find any experience I have in a library always combines the two states, whether my visit is diurnal or nocturnal.

Each successive chapter of the book is called The Library as ...; the first three are The Library as Myth, Order, and Space ...  These are delightful exercises – full of wit, insight and instruction – with comments that every collector of books will recognise:

The existence of every library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present.  It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here.

And everywhere there are discussions of the key problems of the library – what to keep when space is limited, whether to discard (No, never!), in what order to keep the books.   Again and again, the tendency of the books to govern the reader or librarian, rather than vice versa, raises its head.  We learn about the library of Alexandria, about the ordering of the earliest Chinese catalogues, and about the life of digital media.  For the book lover, there is delight on every page.

I have arranged, in homage to Manguel's vision of the library at night, that this post will appear at 13 minutes after midnight - a suitable dark time of the soul, although I might well still be reading.

Streetwise

To Dorset, and to the Chedington Street Fair, an annual event which does what it says on the tin.  I could have been at WOMAD, but that takes organising in advance, and hey, the Fair’s not on the radio.  I did my neighbourly duty, buying things – ice-cream, a coffee pot for the family that visits occasionally and misses its coffee badly, some tapes for the car, and – of course – some second hand books.

 

Book pricing was straightforward - £1 for hardbacks, 50 pence for paperbacks.  I bought a couple of fine hardback Kiplings, two collections of short stories; and the Paul Auster New York Trilogy.  I read the first volume of Auster’s trilogy some time ago [link], and wasn’t sure whether to read more – but at £1 for all three, there didn’t seem any argument against at least having it on the shelf.  But I most look forward to browsing through the 600 items in a magnificent prose anthology, edited by the eccentric ‘Q’, Arthur Quiller-Couch, which ranges from John Trevisa (mid/late C14th) to Rupert Brooke.

St Petersburg books

My first ever trip to Russia soon – a few days in St Petersburg - so I have been looking out a few relevant books.  They include J M Coetzee’s Master of St Petersburg,  the short story collection A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by Victor Pelevin, You Will Hear Thunder, a collection of poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich (a real trip back into my teenage past), and mafia thriller Dead Meat by Philip Kerr.  I should of course read some Dostoevsky, but I was attracted by the virtues of brevity and novelty, so I have left even Crime and Punishment at home.  Another option would be Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, an autobiographical work covering his St Petersburg childhood. 

Dead Meat left me completely unstirred and slightly revolted, so I abandoned the violence and the mafia after 50 pages.  Of the others, you'll hear more!

 

Any other ideas?

Der verbranntem Bucher

A chilling article in Tuesday's The Times, a review of a book about the infamous burning of the books under Hitler in 1933, good writers and bad, Jewish and gentile, men of the left and of the right.  And all, complained Stefan Zweig, without writers protestsing.  Volker Weidermann, the young journalist who has written Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher (The Book of the Burning Books), has read many of the banned list, and found some real gems - but lost for a generation, or for two, or for ever.

George Smiley was undercover in Germany in this period and saw the burning of the books, and rejoiced that he knew his enemy.  Mann was among many who faced a new humiliation:

And for those who did survive till 1945, there was one last, bitter pill to swallow: “Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,” Weidermann says. “The public that had burnt their books in 1933 still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a ‘better Germany' that would welcome him back.”

This is only just published in German, but I hope it is translated soon: it contains a lesson we cannot forget, a lesson which will bear endless retelling.

Fadiman U

Anne Fadiman has written two lovely books of essays, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large And At Small (2007).  The first is basically about books, though books approached from slightly quirky angles; the second is more general – and, I think, slightly less successful.  But in the art of essay writing (which has been dying ever since it was invented, so much so that Fadiman wryly observes that the essay mourning the passing of the essay is an important and vigorous sub-genre!) she is clearly very accomplished, and extremely witty.

In Ex Libris, in Marrying Libraries for example, she deals with the trauma of merging her husband’s and her own libraries, a mere eleven years after they started living together.  Now that is something I can understand; certain books are old friends, and someone else’s copy is just not the same, and other people have such contrary views on classification.  They do merge their books, but it involves long and tortuous negotiations, concessions and reluctant agreements, and it actually begins to unravel in some respects soon afterwards.  And in another essay, Sir, You Must Never Do That To A Book, her brother is rebuked by a note left by the chambermaid in a hotel for leaving a book face down (a crime I acknowledge I very occasionally commit myself), and she uses this as a starting point for discussing how different people treat books.  Some treat their books as sacred objects and insist on cleanliness and purity, while others regard the physical book as nothing, using torn out pages for notes, some even tearing out parts of a book they had read while travelling in order to reduce weight.  I am a man of the middle ground myself, but passions run high.

In The Joy of Sesquipedelians she looks at the joys of precise but unloved and unused words – and finds no less than 22 that she didn’t know in a single book.  O, alright then, they are: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcade, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodeman, goetic, opopanax.  One friend knew no less than nine of these, I managed 4 that I really knew, and another 3 that I’d have recognised in context.  And how I've managed all these years without retromingent - "urinating backwards", I really can't say!  This is only fun, but anyone following me in reading C P Snow will know his predilection for such words, hebephrenia being the most recent example I can recall - "the insanity of pubescence".  My personal favourites are heteroclite and myristicivorous - do have fun with those!

Overall, I’d recommend Ex Libris to any booklover, they’re a joy; the essays in At Large And At Small, however, are of more general interest (coffee, collecting, working at night) but sometimes lack the brilliant spark of the other essays.

The title of this post, incidentally, is the name her family gave to themselves when competing against the television in an American quiz show, the equivalent of the British University Challenge.  They almost always "won"!

Blinding light

Up unusually early recently, and just caught this brilliant morning sunshine on books in the study, chopped up dramatically by a wooden blind.

 

Reading for 09 - just a start! Sunday Salon

I have really, very little idea what I'll read in 2009 (though it will include a lot of Powell, Austen, Homer, Kipling, Borges and Eliot, as well as heaps of classic mystery fiction), but there are two "starters for ten" as they say.  First, I made an assault on the bookshop, and another on the London Library, just before Christmas, and this was my booty:

 

Second, I have decided not to read Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music Of Time this New Year holiday, as I normally do (though I will doubtless read it later in the year).  Instead, I am going to read C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, an altogether more substantial undertaking - eleven novels of 400 pages or so each.  He isn't a great novelist, but I do think he's underrated, and he offers a fascinating insight into the twentieth century from the viewpoint of a northern lower middle class boy who makes good, a viewpoint with which I have, for family reasons, a great deal of sympathy.  I will start with A Time of Hope - the first in order of the completed sequence, but not the first written. Thereafter, it isn't always easy to keep them in order, as some overlap the others slightly or completely, and they weren't, especially early in the sequence, written in order.   I shall take a long while over this, reading other stuff en route, but I shall keep you informed at every step.

Class of 08: Sunday Salon

As others are doing, I am choosing my best books of 2008.  "Best" is word with too much baggage, and I decline always to put one above another, so I've picked 7 books which were my most valuable reading experiences, but I'm excluding re-reads, which will save the list always being the same!  So, in alphabetical order of author, with a strong bias to the later letters of the alphabet, especially the Ws, here they are:

• Roger Deakin's Wildwood, a poetic but very practical book about the wondrous world of trees in the landscapes and cultures of the world;
• A marvellous book about Africa, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun;
• Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson, a magnificently obsessive description of a wild landscape and a wild history;
• John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, one of the most gripping and powerful novels I have ever read (the utterly different Travels With Charley also almost made it!);
• The Jamesian Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, which was a total surprise - I mean, I knew that Steinbeck was a great writer, I just hadn't read enough of him - but Wharton I approached sceptically;
• Patrick White's Voss - a towering monument of a novel which no one else liked!  It was touch and go between this and Radetsky March, but I realised that was (just) back in 2007;
• The engaging Lighthouskeeping by Jeanette Winterson, whose The Passion also came into consideration - I enjoyed this greatly, especially the concepts that all stories are one, no story has an ending, and so on.

If you have been with me on the journey, or some of it, I hope you have had fun and read with the same pleasure that I have.  Now to think about what to read next year!

Francis Bacon

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Francis Bacon at the Tate: this link will show the Tate's introduction to this exhibition, but here is my favourite painting, a study after Velasquez' Portrait of Innocent X.

 

Actually, I didn't care for much of the exhibition.  A lot was angry without being constructive, and some was just revolting.  But it was tremendously powerful, and some of the portraits will haunt me for a long time.  I'd urge you to see it, but don't expect to be entertained or amused - it's much tougher than that.  But it did make me think about the other Francis Bacon, who wrote like an angel.  Here is the sixteenth century master of prose talking about deformity, something which comes naturally to mind while looking at the Tate exhibition, exhibiting both his grace and his wisdom:

DEFORMED persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature. Certainly there is a consent, between the body and the mind; and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. But because there is, in man, an election touching the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured, by the sun of discipline and virtue. Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is more deceivable; but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect.

 

Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person, that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself, to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons, are extreme bold. First, as in their own defence, as being ex posed to scorn; but in process of time, by a general habit. Also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weak ness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay. Again, in their superiors, it quencheth jealousy towards them, as persons that they think they may, at pleasure, despise: and it layeth their competitors and emulators asleep; as never believing they should be in possibility of advancement, till they see them in possession. So that upon the matter, in a great wit, deformity is an advantage to rising.

Failures: Sunday Salon

Not every book I start do I enjoy or value, but those are much fewer in number which I fail to finish.  I used to hold strong opinions about this, feeling that one owed a duty to the author to finish, but now I feel that life is too short. If the author has failed in his duty of keeping the reader amused or informed or otherwise engaged, the reader must be free to move on!

On my recent holiday, although I read a great deal of wonderful stuff, two books fell into this category – Hope Muntz’ The Golden Warrior and  James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.  The Muntz I brought back with me (it was a library book), but the Mohicans were left in the South Seas!  I just could not develop any interest in Fenimore Cooper's cardboard characters and stultifying prose - though I now understand Stalky's reference to the "giddy Chingangook"!.

I came across Hope Muntz' book in Slightly Foxed, where it got a rave review from Jon Stallworthy, and has the impeccable academic credential of being introduced by the late great G M Trevelyan; and she was clearly a serious historian in her own right.  The Golden Warrior covers, over 20 years or more, the relationship between Harold Godwinson and William the Bastard, whose fateful meeting at Hastings ("Santlache fight") in 1066 had such an impact on the history of England in particular, but also on what we now call France.  It was a truly epic moment, and was the culmination of decades of politics, religion, and military struggle.  And the novel is comprehensive and accurate - but is entirely without any spark or excitement, weighted down by detail and obscurity.

Tellingly, it was published in 1948, when Britain had just escaped invasion (again).  It is a worthy, mighty achievement, but it is a dead thing.  Stallworthy is much excited by Muntz' avoidance of words with a Greek or Latin root, painting, as he puts it, "only from a Saxon palette".  This is a ridiculous idea - why should a twentieth century novelist deny herself the full range of words available - particularly as her story is set much in Normandy and among Churchmen who might, perchance, have been using early French and Latin!?  There was a long tradition that Harold escaped alive from Hastings, and to clean my palette after this book, I shall re-read Kipling's marvellous story on the subject soon - The Tree of Justice, in Rewards and Fairies.

These little piggies went on holiday ... Sunday Salon

 ... and these stayed at home.  We have all had this problem - how to prune the book list for a holiday - and how books keep adding themselves becasue they're so relevant.

I'm off to the South Pacific soon, and I naturally need a bird book, and a travel guide, and probably a book or two  - fiction or non-fiction - based on the places I'm visiting.  Then I need challenging new work, and a few comfort blankets.  And ideally, I'd only take 6 books .. well, this could be very hard!  And here's the pile of books I've reluctantly put aside, which will have to wait for my return:

 

Of this lot, I probably most regret Dampier's New Voyage Round the World, which just feels so appropriate - but it's so huge.  And here's the list from which, over the next few days, more will have to be culled so I that I can actually lift my bags (knowing that I'll probably buy something else at the airport!)

 

Niall Ferguson on Empire, a Dickens, an Austen, Tristram Shandy because Harriet said I must read it.  Hope Muntz's novel about the Norman Conquest, a mighty and eccentric tome about the Vanuatu of the 1930s by Tom Harrisson, who lived among the natives of Malekula by himself for a year - leaving any of these is going to be hard!  Not to mention the bird book and guidebook, and a terrestial map and a nautical chart of the area.

But I have my iPod, with dozens of novels, poems, and non-fiction books on it, so perhaps that will save me, and make up for those I leave behind?

Pullman's Table: Sunday Salon

Have you seen the Writer's Table feature which Waterstone's are running? At the moment, it's Philip Pullman's selection, and I saw him talking about it in the Times last weekend.  It's a sales gimmick, of course, but I always welcome opportunities to broaden my reading and find new things (well, almost always). 

Pullman's selection was a particularly interesting one, I thought.  Of the 40 books he was allowed, I would say at least six of the authors represented could well have been on my list - not that W's are likely to ask me - Kipling, Le Carre, Burton, Dawkins, Mann, and Rilke, though only in the case of Rilke would I have chosen exactly the same book (Duino Elegies, a marvellous, spellbinding series of poems, even in translation).  Several other books I would very much like to read - Hogg (Justified Sinner), the Woodhouse and the H G Wells, and the Penrose book of science too. 

A couple of books caught my eye immediately - Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys was on the list, with this description -

Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.

Well, I loathe Hardy, but this sounded as if it had to be read, and anyway, an author who dares call his hero Wolf demands attention.  So I brought it from the library, finding in the process that Powys wrote a very full diary of a couple of years living in Dorset, so I got that too.  See, the list has already worked its magic.

And Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson might be worth a look: "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero. "

Other books on his list I can take or leave - the Kleist (Marquis of O) for example, which never gripped me, or Musil's Man Without Qualities, or all the childrens' books.

But there's one book not on his list, because it's not in print in the UK.  He wanted to include The Balloonist by the American novelist MacDonald Harris; I looked for this in the library, but could only  find Screenplay.  I have never heard of this author, but I'm looking forward to giving this a go.  Normblog has an intriguing essay with more information - he's got Pullman on Harris.

So a very intriguing list, which took me in a number of unexpected directions.  While I was at the library, I got some pre-reading for my next holiday, and a novel about the Norman Conquest by Hope Muntz, called  The Golden Warrior - so the "read me now pile" is toppling over!

In praise of islands: Sunday Salon

A number of books about islands on the go or in mind today.  I read Swallows and Amazons recently - or rather listened to it on CD in the car - and noted the sense of privacy and independence that comes with an island - the territory is clearly demarcated and their are the obvious problems about getting there which emphasise whose it is! 

More recently, following a couple of interesting articles in Slightly Foxed, I have been looking at A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier; the voyage lasted many years, from 1679 to 1691, and the book, an immediate success, was published in 1697.  Heh, they got decent holidays in those days!  Dampier was an interesting man, half traveller, half pirate, he had all sorts of adventures, but was also an acute observer and keen diarist, and has a fine straightforward way with words - so "The Lime is a sort of bastard or Crab-limon".  His comments cover social customs, agriculture, wildlife, landscape, history, and he spends much of his time on and around the islands of the Caribbean and of the South Pacific.  Well worth a browse - and when I've finished my browsing, I'll probably post again.

Another book I wanted to read was Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia, an account of his anthropological explorations among the Tikopia, who inhabit a small, very isolated island in the Solomons Islands.  Firth published this "well known classic of the genre" (the " marks indicate that I'd never heard of it, I fear) in 1936, after decades of living there.  However, I found a copy and blanched at its length, technicality and denseness, so have taken up his much smaller History and Traditions of Tikopia.  Another, very accessible, book about this area is Arthur Grimble on the Gilbert (and Ellice) Islands, which I read as a boy.

Other island books come to mind - Stevenson's Treasure Island, of course, and Ballantyne's tiresomely moral but still exciting Coral Island.  And Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names, off the New England coast, which I read with pleasure a few months ago. And Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of course, off the coast of Chile, and .. but I could go on for ever - and no doubt you will anyway point out the favourite island books I have missed!

Enjoy your Sunday - I'm about to cycle out in pouring rain to give a tour at a wildlife centre - and in this weather I have a strong hunch there will be no customers!

Calves-foot jelly

Readers of novels older than the readers themselves often struggle with words and phrases which would have been so well known to the original audience as to excite no comment at all.  So dozens of novels refer to calves-foot jelly and to negus.  I knew that one was a common food for invalids, and that the other was a drink much served at balls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but my knowledge went no deeper. So I was intrigued by an excellent article in Intelligent Life about calves-foot jelly - which has a sweet and a savoury form.  To my surprise, the sweet form is the classic English one, including cinnamon, citrus fruit or juice, and Madeira or brandy. 

I hadn't realised how long calves-foot jelly lasted in literature.  Here it is, in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow - a fine shot at the fads and fashions of the day, in 1921, by an author quite unjustly neglected nowadays (Read After The Fireworks or Brief Candles for shorter tales, or Eyeless in Gaza for a major novel - not to mention Brave New World for an early view of a technical elysium which is in fact hell).

[Earlier that day, George had caught the sisters scoffing in secret] ... At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than usual. Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a spoonful of calves’-foot jelly. "I feel a little stronger today", she said to Lord Timpany, when he congratulated her on this increase of appetite; "a little more material", she added, with a nervous laugh. Looking up, she caught George’s eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.

In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment alone.

"You won’t tell anyone, George? Promise you won’t tell anyone", she implored.

"It would make us look so ridiculous. And besides, eating IS unspiritual, isn’t it? Say you won’t tell anyone."

"I will", said George brutally. "I’ll tell everyone, unless...[you marry me.]"

"It’s blackmail."

"I don’t care, said George. ’I’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide."

And, of course, she does marry him.  The thought of being outed as a girl who enjoyed her food was just too much to bear.

And negus is made with  - among other things - calves-foot jelly.  Odd to the modern taste to have a sweet thing and an alcoholic drink based on meat.  I know that Cornflower will look up a recipe and make calves-foot jelly, and I look forward to her report.

Late for work? Sunday Salon

I've just signed up to have my The Times delivered, the main motivation for which was the offer of ten Penguins free, one a day, for the first two weeks.  I can see that if, as promised, these arrive each day before 7 am, I may be late into work quite a lot over the next two weeks.  Amazing that in a list of ten interesting books, I have read none of them - bring on the clang of the letterbox.

Here they all are:

• Some of them (the Ali Smith, Pat Barker) I don't know at all; and I can't say I'm wild to read the Paxman or the Hornby. 
• But some of the others will be eagerly awaited - Niall Ferguson for example is a fine historian, who writes well and convincingly, and is successfully challenging the lazy liberal guilt which has monopolised views of Britain's Imperial past for decades now. 
• Lovelock's Gaia thesis is well known, but although deeply sympathetic to the concerns he raises, I have never read either of the great man's books - though I don't (yet!) share his pessimism about the environment. 
• Alain de Botton, who in this book writes about six philosophers and the value they can still bring to our lives (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), though I hope with a title like that, there will be reference to Boethius (the study, you will recall of the academic Emily Brightman in Temporary Kings).
• Kapuściński on Africa, a view of the dark continent by a journalist of high standing who has worked there for most of his life. 
• Chomsky, who may have been utterly brilliant (and on language, his pupil Stephen Pinker continues to amaze us) but has some very peculiar ideas about politics writes about America's imperialist ambitions in an analysis which was probably out of date when it was written (2003) but will certainly be superseded by Obama's election in November.  But it will still be interesting to read the words of such a genius, however wrong I think  he may be!

Of heroes and duffers: Sunday Salon

Little serious reading while in Dorset last week, but I did listen to two audio books; it would be hard to think of any books more different:  Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, read by Gabriel Woolf, and Homer’s Odyssey, in the Cowper translation, read by Anton Lesser.  There are heroes aplenty in Homer, but the duffers are in Swallows and Amazons - or rather we hope they're not!): you will doubtless recall father's telegram giving the children permission to go sailing and camp on the island alone:

BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN

(Had it been the Chapman translation, I could have made a tenuous link, by way of Keats’ On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer, where you will recall he was so amazed that he compared himself to the conquistadors and their first sight of the Pacific Ocean:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

And Darien is what Titty calls the small promontory overlooking the lake, where they dream of camping on the island while waiting for their father in Malta to send that telegram.  From the Pacific to the Lake District is a single leap of a small girl’s imagination.)

Sorry for the long bracket - back to the audio books: Listening to books is a different experience to reading them.  I was listening in the car, so other things inevitable demand your attention at critical moments, interruptions come at inconvenient moments you would not choose.  And yet, this is very satisfying; you get the story (both are edited, but not fiercely), they are read exquisitely well, and you are not tempted to skip or hasten on.  This is particularly relevant in the Cowper, where I cannot really imagine having the patience to sit down and read it through, and I am sure his worthy verse would pall if I was reading off the page: but with Lesser doing the work for me, I have the double enjoyment of the wonderful story of Odysseus, sacker of cities and master of  cunning, and the calm elegance of Cowper’s eighteenth century (just) verse.

This is Cowper, describing Odysseus' passage between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis:

… Thus, many a groan
Heaving, we navigated sad the streight,
For here stood Scylla, while Charybdis there
With hoarse throat deep absorb'd the briny flood.
Oft as she vomited the deluge forth,
Like water cauldron'd o'er a furious fire
The whirling deep all murmur'd, and the spray
On both those rocky summits fell in showers.
But when she suck'd the salt wave down again,

Then, all the pool appear'd wheeling about
Within, the rock rebellow'd, and the sea
Drawn off into that gulf disclos'd to view
The oozy bottom. Us pale horror seiz'd,
Thus, dreading death, with fast-set eyes we watch'd
Charybdis ; mean-time, Scylla from the bark
Caught six away, the bravest of my friends ;
And as I watching stood the galley's course
And them within, uplifted high in air
Their legs and arms I saw. …

Cowper’s calm verse rather accentuates than diminishes the violence and patriarchy of the original, and it makes a fantastic contrast to something like Logue’s War Music. The violence is real and vivid, especially in the scene with Cyclops and the final revenge.  But in Swallows and Amazons, in spite of many declarations of war, it all ends in a scramble to be home in bed in time, or – when Captain Flint is forced to walk the plank – a slap up tea with cakes and ginger pop.  I enjoyed them both, the nostalgia and the world shaking epic, and I’m only very slightly ashamed to admit it!

Medley for a long flight: Sunday Salon

I have just been to Chile, and although it was a brief visit, I knew I would be spending something like 35 hours in planes or airports; what I did not know was that I would have an enforced 24 hours delay (in Madrid, than which there are many worse places to be stranded, although some luggage would have been nice).  With that in mind, I took a pile of books - very varied - as well as The Economist and New Scientist.

• Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson; she is an author I have always enjoyed, witness Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, but I'm afraid this was the one book I didn't open all trip.  It came back with virgin pages.
• Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck, which I was sent by Penguin for review as part of a promotion.  It wasn't the book they were meant to send me (that arrived while I was away), but it is entirely delightful.  As I read the opening chapter, which explains his desire to travel in America, I felt myself marking down suitable quotations on every page for later use, so this was a great joy, found entirely without effort on my part.  He is observant, whimsical and amusing, often all in one, and has some good stories to tell.  And of course, his prose is impeccable - very English prose, if I may say so without offending American readers - and his technical skill outstanding.  "We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us...In this a journey is like marriage.  The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
• Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin, an amusing, very dated crime novel set at the beginning of the second war, starring the eccentric and infuriating Gervase Fen, a literature don (there's lots of literature in these books) and the slightly shy and ineffective Geoffrey Vintner as his foil.  The plot is very silly, but a lot of fun is had en route:  "Fundamentally, Geoffrey was afraid of women...Beyond the age of thirty, he had gradually shunned acquaintance with these puzzling beings.  Consequently, he approached this new example of the species with a trepidation accentuated by her obvious charm."
• Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Physically, a tiny book of only just over 100 pages, but a monster of the nouveau roman of the 1950s, a real bully of a book which seeks to invoke intensity in one sphere - human sexual relations - by avoiding them and building up a detailed - very detailed - picture of the world around them.  Exactly where a shadow falls is crucial - the placing of a cup of coffee on the table is an exercise of Euclidean absorption - but the man and the woman are only just there, and their emotions are not mentioned at all, ever.  I loathed it, but felt I was in the presence of a master: I immediately understood the comment in the introduction that he was a great influence on film, a leading figure of the nouvelle vague, as this read almost like a description of a set and instructions to the camaraman.
• Brown on Resolution by C S Forester; a straightforward adventure story of a naval rating in the Galapagos, with a serious social twist in the lead up events.
• Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica:  I shall spare you any comment on this, except that it was completely useless, as I never had any time to walk round the city's parks and gardens.

And while I was there, I bought an English-Spanish parallel anthology of Essential Neruda;  in addition, I was halfway through Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, which I left by my bedside.  As ever, I will be posting at more length on many of these books over coming days and weeks.

I hope you would have found something worth reading in my briefcase?

Difficult decisions for good books: Sunday Salon

I have recently been fortunate enough to find a country retreat which I hope to visit regularly.  One of the puzzles, of course, is what books to choose to take to this new paradise.  Or, to be more honest, which of my books would choose to make the move to rural bliss? (You never own a book or a dog - you are its servant).  I've just taken down sixty or so on a first trip, and these are not easy decisions - which books would I prefer to read where?  Can I live without a copy of that in my London home?  So, I walked the shelves and took what took my fancy - and the pictures show you some of the results.

 

 

Some things, of course, don't need choosing, because I will have copies of certain authors and certain works at both houses: there will be a complete Jane Austen, lots of Kipling, all of T S Eliot, the complete Borges (a contradiction in terms?), and Powell's Dance in both places, with no doubt some others.  But there will also be anthologies (Oxford Book of Verse and Modern too are on the shelf above), Trollope and much else.  You might be able to make out some Levi, Robertson Davies  and Neil Gunn (recently recommended to Cornflower for her bookgroup) in the shelf below.

 

 

And there are lots of murder mysteries, and things I've never read or not read for an age - Doris Lessing, Marlowe, and several worthy tomes I shall relish the country quiet to attack, including A History of Histories, Richard Fortey's book on the Natural History Museum, and many others.  Books on Dorset, on woodlands, and wildlife - not to mention a great pile of maps, also tend to gravitate countrywards.

 

 

No doubt the book I really need right now will always be in the other place, but I think I can be assured of two things: there will always be something interesting to read wherever I am an - and the collection will grow, in spite of my best efforts at restraint!

Contre Contre Venise: Sunday Salon

I mentioned in my Sunday Salon post a couple of weeks ago that I had been reading Regis Debray’s Against Venice.  Finally, I have finished it, and  I wanted to return to it, partly because I did find it very spirited and provocative, and partly to touch on two other books with strong Venetian connections which I've enjoyed - a play by Goldoni, and a photographic update of Ruskin's Stones of Venice.  I will also say just a few words about the biggest book I have bought this year - Sylvie Guillem's Invitation!

Debray's book was published in 1995, and was recommended to me as a counter to the over adulation of Venice that can sometimes greet the new visitor to La Serenissima.  He sets out his stall at once, in the very first sentence of this slight volume:  Until you have laid the ghost of Venice within you – repressed every posture, leaning, pretension, temptation or daydream capable of being descibed as “Venetian” – you will never be on level terms with the internal enemy...

I don’t know what that means, and I instinctively react against it:    What, exactly, is Debray’s point?  I think it is that so many people are in thrall, that they can no longer question anything in Venice, and that Venice is no longer real, but a theatre - beautiful, ancient, but not alive, purely a show.  So for example, he says that: Venice cuts the figure of a carcass, an empty shell: not physically depopulated but spiritually dried out, dead to all magic ...[it is] a mirage from which the sacred has fled.

For him, Naples is much more alive, vulgar and exciting, and beautiful too - but as an afterthought; beauty is not the city's reason for existence.  I do not feel much sympathy for this view - I think I can love two cities, and will try to do so!  I enjoyed Venice, and will go back; I savoured its beauty and its decay; and I found pleasure in the quiet and carefree streets and canals away from the tourists honeypots.  But I was not seduced, I am not in thrall, I owe no fealty to the Bride of the Sea; as befits Voss himself, I remain my own man, critical and slightly distant from the myth that is Venice.

Briefly, to some other books, at least one of which I will post on separately:

• Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera (My Hostess), a comedy set in an inn outside Venice, and performed there in 1725.  A delightful, lighthearted satire on morals and mores, and one of his plays would be well worth reading for anybody visiting Venice - and I would also recommend Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.  I will post again on Goldoni soon.
• Sarah Quill's Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, a book of fine modern architectural photographs of venice, with extracts from Ruskin's matchless prose alongside, and some of his brilliant drawings as well.  Evocative, beautiful, informative: does it get any better than this? (Or any worse, Debray would say!).

• Finally, Sylvie Guillem's massive Invitation.  This isn't a coffee table book, it's a coffee table!  Lots of great, beautiful photographs pf this exquisite dancer, many of them in performance or rehearsal - but many at home or on holiday.  It's exuberant, self-indulgent, and over the top , but a joy for any of her admirers.  She's an extraordinary dancer, and an extraordinary woman - not at all beautiful, she can radiate beauty and grace, as well as burning emotion and sexuality, through her dance and her photographs.  Is this what the French mean by the phrase jolie laide?

Liquorice afternoon: Sunday Salon

Allsorts of books building up on my desk at the moment, and here, at Sunday Salon time, are four that are under way at the moment (I always read more than book at a time, often five or six!).

• Regis Debray's Against Venice, recommended by a blog reader as an antidote to the occasionally overwhelming hype about Venice.  Debray is one of those of overarching political-cultural intellectuals that only the French can really produce - supporting Che Guevara in Bolivia, then advising the Mitterand government in France, and now interested mainly in "mediology", the study of the transmission of signs in society.  Against Venice is a slight work, provocative and stimulating, and is a blast against the canonisation and excessive veneration of this city.  He sets out his stall early:  he says it is "[not] my fault that Western history has set the family jewel at the top of the Italian boot, glittering obscenely and tenaciously in the fold of the groin"!  For him, Venice is a drug, of which only the first trip is a good experience.  He makes a passionate case for prefering Naples: "Naples has a cheerful skeleton, with merry winking eye-sockets.  Venice fades the flesh, the honeymoon temple hastens the end of love".

• C S Forester's Lieutenant Hornblower.  The first of the full length Hornblower novels in some ways, as Midshipman Hornblower is really a collection of short stories strung together by a thinnish storyline.  Forester is the first, and still the best, of the naval storytellers - and some of his work is distinctly respectable, notably The Gun.  If it's good enough for Churchill, it's good enough for me!

• Primo Levi's The Wrench, which I have been reading because I mentioned cranes in a recent posts - the feathered kind, in Japanese prints - and these stories of an Italian workman, a skilled rigger of cranes and bridges came to mind.  These are wonderful stories, told by the rigger in the first person, about his work around the world, full of human detail about triumph and failure, and full of the warmth and pride of the man who builds things, rather than just talks about them.  I love Levi's writing, and this is one of his most compelling books, a kind of counterpoint to the wonderful stories based, very loosely, on chemistry in The Periodic Table.  I recommend all his work, but these two books are particularly accessible and entertaining.

•   Last week, I went to the Cranach exhibition at the Royal   Academy, which - though it was small and didn't include all the famous pictures I knew from around Europe - was very enjoyable and had several lovely gems - including nudes of Venus and Eve.  I bought the catalogue, and will spend the next few weeks occasionally flipping through it and reading a little here, admiring a painting there.  He lived around the turn of the C15-16th, working in Vienna around 1500.  He was a close friend of Martin Luther, and this exhibition contained many fine portraits, some of Luther himself, a number of nudes of various subjects - a rather new and daring departure for the German renaissance - and several beheadings, notably portrayals of Salome.  It's almost too late to see it, but go if you can.

Herons and cranes

As a child, I was always fascinated by herons, which were much rarer then than they are now, and always saw it as a lucky omen if I saw one on the estuary where we lived while walking the dogs.  They were aloof, tall and elegant, and I love them still.  Now, of course, there are other herons in this country - little egrets, for example, smaller but more elegant, dappling the south coast at Poole or points west.  And when I grew, in my early 20s, to a love of all things Japanese, I found that cranes were a powerful motif, in drawing, sculpture, painting, and textiles.  And now, we have cranes back in this country, in East Anglia, and with luck they will spread and become widely known and loved again.  Now I know that cranes and herons are quite different, but they share many qualities and attributes, and I am fond of all these leggy, striding birds, still and commanding.

These images come together in Yasunari Kawabata's short novel, Thousand Cranes.  Like Rituals by Cees Nooteboom, on which I have posted before, it is around the tea ceremony, but is a much less violent, forbidding book - but it's a very fine story, full of sadness and confusion, which I recall loving but the detail of which has faded quite away.   But Kawabata is a fine writer, and this is well worth a visit to the local library - as is Snow Country, or Master of Go. 

Here, to capture the mood, are two Japanese prints: the first is Five Egrets by Shosun, the second Hashimoto's Snowy Herons.   For these, and the next print, I am indebted to the Wetmore Print Collection of Connecticut College which allows free use of its images.

.

 

And here is another print, Kokyo's Sagimusume, the spirit of the heron or white egret in Kabuki

 

 And finally, with an elegance all its own, a crane in the distance, seen from the Thames in west London. And there's a very wonderful series of short stories - Primo Levi's The Wrench -  about building cranes and similar structures, which is absolutely unmissable:  a real hymn to homo  faber, the maker of things, and a wonderfully inventive and amusing account of one Italian workman's skillful interaction with all the world.

Growing pile: Sunday Salon

A busy week, in which I don't feel I've done much reading - but in fact, when I look back more carefully, I have, and I've acquired a lot of books too - a familiar problem to me and to many other book lovers, I know.  Recent visitors to my house have remarked that in the space war, the books have definitely got the upper hand, are capturing a number of strategic points - dining table, sink - and are massing for the surge which may overpower me once and for all.

The war metaphors come to mind, because I have been reading Doonesbury, on which I posted recently - fine satire about US involvement in Iraq, and also Welcome to the Nerd Farm, his latest, wonderful collection.  On a completely different front, I've been browsing through Richard Mabey's Beechcombings, a meditation on trees and life, concentrating on the native beech, which he describes in another book as the only English tree we think of in feminine terms, with its smooth bark and sinuous, gentle curves.

Oxfam this week yielded George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying, and I have also been reading The Death of the Critic by Ronan McDonald - of direct interest to all of us, as he examines the role of the popular, including bloggers, on the appreciation of literature and books.  He is inclined to lament the loss of high profile academic criticism, while others laud the democratisation of the bookshop recommendation and the blog.  For me, I am in the middle, and I want to read both.  It would be a shame if the Leavises and the Steiners were to pass away, but I would not give up the wealth of "amateur" comment from friends and bloggers to buy their return.  Also read some fine short stories by the American Z Z Packer, in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.  I recommend them for a hard, sometimes painful look at contemporary poor black America.

Two other books to mention, and to return to later.  First, The Boys Own Annual 1908-09.  Now you may be thinking that this is an extraordinary choice, but I have my reasons.  When I was a child, I had a BOP (as it was known) annual from the early 1900s, and I loved it.  It was given me by an elderly great uncle, and of course, it was fantastically dated - and very white, male, and middle and upwards class - but still a lot of fun.  Somewhere along the line, in some parental clear out or house move, it got lost or given away - but this week I replaced it from abebooks, and am looking forward to serious nostalgic wallowing over coming weeks: there's a lot of wallowing to do, because its  quarto, densely printed, and nearly 900 pages long - you got your money's worth in those days (1d, or one old penny a week - (240 pennies to the pound, for my younger readers!!).

Finally, the week saw me complete Patrick White's Voss, as suggested by Cornflower's book group.  They didn't really take to it wildly, and I'll admit it wasn't a barrel of laughs.  But he is a great writer, and I felt my battle with his anti hero, Johann Ulrich Voss and Laura, with whom he has an intense and spiritual marriage in testing circumstances, was well worth it.  The spirit of Nietzsche hovers over Voss himself, and the passive violence of the Australian outback, and the total inadequacy of man before it - particularly a proud and solitary man - was powerfully portrayed.

If you go down to the woods today

Coming up, a week in Dorset with Oliver Rackham, the great historian of English woods and the landscape.  I expect to walk a lot, and look at lots of trees, of course - my staff refer to it as my "tree-hugging" holiday - but there should also be lots of wonderful reading to think of, if not to do!  I've identified five things to read, but there may be more - my readers are rich in suggestions.  And here are some favourite tree poems from one of my earliest posts.

Of course, I shall take some Rackham books, probably his most recent book, Woodlands, though of course he has written many others, including The Last Forest (about Hatfield) and The History of the Countryside.  He writes clearly and well, and is a great destroyer of what I shall term rural myths, such as the proposition that the oak woods of England were chopped down to build the Navy.  I look forward to having my ignorance exposed! 

We will be deep in the heart of Hardy country, so I will take The Woodlanders.  It's a long time since I read Hardy, and I'm nervous, because I found it very frustrating. I felt, no doubt with adolescent impatience - and my adolescence last many years beyond the normal span, may not be over yet - that his prose was cloying and his plots creakily sentimental.  But I couldn't put him down, he was quite compulsive.  So I shall be intrigued to re-explore him; and apart from the appropriateness of the locale, I understand I will learn more about brorches and liggers.

Richard Mabey, a national journalist on landscapes and ecology, is always worth reading, though sometimes too keen on a slightly mystical or spiritual element for me.  But I shall, on the recommendation of more than one of you, take his Beechcombing with me.  Beech is a hugely important wood of modern British woodlands, though it didn't used to be so widespread.   I'm sure I shall enjoy his history and his understanding, and the many pictures of beeches he has culled from art galleries and antique books. 

Recently, I read Roger Deakin's Wildwood, and I shall probably take that with me as well, just to remind myself of some European and wider experience, today and yesterday.  It was an excellent book, and will be a pleasant browse again.

Of course, the ultimate description of a wild wood is in Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows: 

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering - even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.

Hellebore

Hellebore and borage were reputedly sovereign remedies for madness, melancholy, accidie.  In  Borage recently, I shared some of my excitement in reading Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a book which is at once overwhelming and enticing.  And I finished that post with a sentence which I think will become a theme for all the rest of my saying and writing:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

But now I have got through the introductions, and the exploratory material on melancholy, and in this post I am exploring some his solutions for melancholy - leaving the the wilder channels of his thought, and the remoter backwaters, such as werewolves, witches, excessive study, and the decline in academic standards for your own exploration!  It is worth exploring, but be prepared for anything, and be undisciplined in your reading, just browse at random, not trying to make sense of the whole - or you'll surely fall prey to some form of madness, and Boots is fresh out of borage and hellebore!

Burton covers a lot of things which might ameliorate, control or cure melancholy, and I quote some of them now, partly for the sake of his views, but also for his wonderful prose.  Let's look at tobacco, hellebore, alcohol, and coffee.

He starts by praising tobacco as a valuable remedy, but abruptly changes tack, reporting that:

... as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, land, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

As for hellebore itself,

Black hellebore, that most renowned plant, and famous purger of melancholy, which all antiquity so much used and admired, was first found out by Melanpodius a shepherd ... who, seeing it to purge his goats when they raved, practised it upon Elige and Calene, King Praetus' daughters, that ruled in Arcadia, near the fountain Clitorius, and restored them to their former health ... and it was generally so much esteemed of the ancients for this disease amongst the rest, that they sent all such as were crazed, or that doted, to be purged, where this plant was in abundance to be had. ... Lilius Geraldus saith, that Hercules, after all his mad pranks upon his wife and children, was perfectly cured by a purge of hellebore, which an Anticyrian administered unto him. They that were sound commonly took it to quicken their wits, [and] Cameades the academic, when he was to write against Zeno the stoic, purged himself with hellebore first.  In such esteem it continued for many ages, till at length Mesue and some other Arabians began to reject and reprehend it, upon whose authority for many following lustres, it was much debased and quite out of request, held to be poison and no medicine; and is still oppugned to this day by Crato and some junior physicians. [Quotes various "modern" objections].. and Nicholas Leonicus hath a story of Solon, that besieging, I know not what city, steeped hellebore in a spring of water, which by pipes was conveyed into the middle of the town, and so either poisoned, or else made them so feeble and weak by purging, that they were not able to bear arms. Notwithstanding all these cavils and objections, most of our late writers do much approve of it.

As for alcohol, why not pop down to the Bull and Bush for a couple of pints to provoke your urine or expel wind and cold poisons?  No more ridiculous than some of the nonsense talked about nowadays by the snake oil fringe of alternative medicine!

Amongst this number of cordials and alteratives, I do not find a more present remedy, than a cup of wine or strong drink, if it be soberly and opportunely used. It makes a man bold, hardy, courageous, "whetteth the wit," if moderately taken, (and as Plutarch saith) "it makes those which are otherwise dull, to exhale and evaporate like frankincense, or quicken" (Xenophon adds) as oil doth fire. "A famous cordial" Matthiolus in Dioscoridum calls it, "an excellent nutriment to refresh the body, it makes a good colour, a flourishing age, helps concoction, fortifies the stomach, takes away obstructions, provokes urine, drives out excrements, procures sleep, clears the blood, expels wind and cold poisons, attenuates, concocts, dissipates all thick vapours, and fuliginous humours."  And that which is all in all to my purpose, it takes away fear and sorrow.

But if you don't drink, have a cup of coffee instead, described by Burton as a wondrous strange habit of the Turks (he is writing in 1621, remember):

The Turks have a drink called coffa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot and as bitter... which they sip still of, and sup as warm as they can suffer; they spend much time in those coffa-houses, which are somewhat like our ale houses or taverns, and there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away the time, and to be merry together, because they find by experience, that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity.

All in all, I've enjoyed my excursions into Burton, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the language and has a taste for the quirky in language or opinion.  But I wouldn't invest in the whole thing, but buy some intelligently edited selection such as Kevin Jackson's.  Happy reading, in all senses.

Borage

I have been browsing through Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy recently.  It’s a very odd book, utterly overwhelming to a modern taste, and extremely long – three substantial volumes in most editions – and full of undisciplined torrents of prose, example building on example until the mind reels.  It’s as if Burton, who knows a lot, cannot bear to leave out anything he has ever noted down or remembered, and piles up prose beyond any measure of pleasure or utility.

But what prose it is!  What a fine writer, and a dramatic writer Burton is; and what an excellent psychologist and philosopher.  I read this in two ways: looking through the first complete volume, to get a feel for the full scale of the work, complete with innumerable quotations from the classics, sometimes even writing in Latin because his subject matter is temporarily delicate – seeking what Gibbon calls the “decent obscurity of a learned language”.  And also in an anthology edited by Kevin Jackson, helpfully sub-sectioned and shortened dramatically, and translated fully.  In either event, it’s an interesting experience and enormous fun, as well as being full of insight and empathy.

Burton’s masterwork was published in 1621, when melancholy was a modish upper class preoccupation, perhaps as angst was in certain parts of the twentieth century, though Burton -a lifelong bachelor, academic and cleric – clearly suffered greatly from Black Dog as Churchill called it, or accidie in medieval terminology (a very good read on this is Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, with its excellent essay on Churchill's depression by Anthony Storr).  But the Anatomy is not just about melancholy – indeed, it is hard to think of anything which is foreign to its all-encompassing grasp.  I feel two posts coming on, since quotation needs to be at some length to convey his inimitable style, and I want to discuss some of his views as well as quote them.

Some of the material I most enjoyed came in his lengthy introduction, including the famous description of the style he intends to use:

I neglect phrases, and labour wholly to inform my reader’s understanding, not to please his ear; ‘tis not my intent or study to compose neatly ... but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected. ... I shall lead thee ... through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike.

Like Nick Jenkins, I particularly appreciate the licence to be “remiss” if I am so affected, and I admire his willingness to (as he affects) not consult the readers’ tastes, though this did not impede the commercial success of the book.  But there are occasions where you can be wearied by his sheer voluminousness, when drinking from a fire hydrant is pulverising not refreshing;  but there are lots of occasions where he builds up torrential images which sweep you up and make you laugh, cry or exult as the paragraphs carry you unresisting along.  And here he is on the main subject of his writing:

... being a kind of dotage, it cannot be otherwise but that the brain must be affected ... and from thence it is communicated to the heart and other inferior parts, which sympathise and are much troubled ... Such as live in over-cold or over-hot climes; such as are born of melancholy parents; as offend in those six non-natural things, are black, or of a high sanguine complexion, that have little heads, that have a hot heart, moist brain, hot liver and cold stomach, have been long sick; such as are solitary by nature, great students, given to much contemplation, lead a life out of action, are most subject to melancholy.  Of sexes both, but men more often; yet women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled.  Of seasons of the year, the autumn is the most melancholy.

Finally (in this first Burton post at least), let me finish with a wonderful sentence which could be at the head of all my writing and saying:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

Borage, by the way, is one of the two sovereign remedies which Burton recommends for melancholy.  But you may want also to read Matthew Johnstone's wonderful Living With A Black Dog and I had a Black Dog, cartoons by a serious sufferer which can really lift your spirits.

Re-Reading

Having finished my annual re-read of the Dance To The Music of Time sequence recently, I was moved to think a little bit about the idea of re-reading things.  It seems to excite, in non- or occasional readers, much more surprise than going to see a film again, or watching a repeat of a favourite television programme or sporting event  And as for looking at a picture again, or listening to music more than once, everyone seems to accept this as completely normal.  Indeed, it would be a sad world if you couldn’t look twice at Las Meninas or listen more than once to the Mahler 3.

So why do people say – “how can you re-read a book, you already know what happens!”?  My first response (apart the fact that the same point can be made about films, music and the rest) is that I very seldom read to find out what happens, or at least not just to find out.  An exception might be a thriller bought in desperation at an airport or a railway station, or – in youth – a Thomas Hardy (novels I found at once unreadable and compulsive).  But even with the “lowest” forms of writing, I try only to read things that I might want to read again – whether it be poetry, high novels, crime thrillers, or travel writing.  This is not, course, to say that I do read them again – life is short, the book so long – but the idea is there.

If someone tells me that I waste my time to re-read a poem of Donne or an Austen novel, I might retort that they should not waste precious minutes tasting a fine cheese or wine a second time, since “they know what it tastes like already”.  And the absurdity is the same, my brain needs nourishment all the time, and it’s enjoyable (and extra rewarding) to give it food it has enjoyed before.

But the real point is that it never is the same.  Sure, the murder is always solved and the same person dunnit, Elizabeth Bennet always marries Darcy, and July is never the cruellest month.  But the experience is always different – my mood, what I have read and learned since my last reading (including the book itself), my attention, my sensitivity to certain factors.  Even with the books I re-read most, I find sentences I swear I have never noticed before, and my taste changes surely over the years and with the gradual influence of wider cultural stimuli.  As a boy, I preferred the Odyssey over the Iliad, now the reverse is true; I grew to love Eliot gradually in my late teens and early twenties, but my passion – still undimmed – has a different quality to it.  And there is the wonderful pleasure of meeting old friends, sometimes knowingly, sometimes sprung upon you by the imperfect memory of the reader.

I read Dance all through every year, and all of Jane Austen, and the short stories of Kipling and Borges; less frequently,  a whole host of books, fiction and non-fiction, and lots of crime novels.  As for poetry, it exists to be re-read and savoured, and Donne and Eliot are often off the shelf.  I shall continue to re-read without shame, as long as I can find savour and depth in the reading, and as long as I have time to read lots and lots of new stuff as well!!

Shadowlands

At the weekend, to the theatre to see Shadowlands, a fine play by William Nicholson about C S Lewis' tragic - but still rewarding? - love for the American lady, Joy Gresham.  Joy becomes very ill and dies soon after they know each other, and Lewis' first passion, in his late 50s, was snatched away soon after a marriage in a hospital ward.  Lewis was Charles Dance, very fine indeed, and the whole thing was funny and then desperately moving - with fine roles for the two main protagonists, but also for her young son and Lewis' brother.  I saw the film many years ago, and enjoyed it, but I think this was more immediate.  There's not more than a couple of weeks to catch it, if you're interested, but it would be well worth it.

But the main reason I raise this is to give a plug to The Screwtape Letters, C S Lewis' wonderful letters from a senior to a junior devil.  He is so well known for the Narnia books and for Surprised By Joy, but this is not as widely read as it should be.  The point of the book, on the surface, is the education of a junior devil by a senior one, as to how best to tempt Christians into sin; of course, its real purpose is the exact opposite - it's moral guidance for the young, but who would have read it then?  The letters are very funny, and deserve an audience among the Christian, the agnostic, and the atheist, and I'm sure among the followers of other faiths.  The older devil's increasing frustration at the ineptitude of the younger is wonderful - and its fun to think of devils as occasionally inept and unthreatening!

A fine haul

A Viking raid on the London Library earlier this week, and some rich loot:

There are the Poems of J H Prynne, unknown to me but earnestly recommended not long ago by a columnist in, I think, The Times (an article which I cannot now trace);  Stones of Aran, which I came across in reading Cees Nooteboom, and which is quite unaffordable even when you can find it;  there is Built By Animals, a piece of serendipity, about how and why animals build complex structures like birds' nests and termite mounds; Bowman's classic mountaineering parody, The Ascent of Rum Doodle; and the first volume of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.  I will let you know how I progress with this lot.

And by the way, Dark Puss, I have borrowed a copy of They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell, if you still want to read it!

Not worth reading?

Has everyone read about Pierre Bayard's new book, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read?  Of course, I've been doing this for years, and this is another book I certainly don't intend to read!

Lady on the Train

I met, the other day, a lady on the train and we talked about books, what else?    So this post is not about a lost Hitchcock thriller, but about reading lists.  Personally, I'm always a little sceptical about the type of list you see in the papers from time to time, exhorting you (or your children) to read such and such a miniature library, but I believe in the canon - so it should be possible.  So this charming lady told me that she was reading her way through lots of lists, but particularly she recommended one printed by the Toronto Globe and Mail a few years ago.  She subsequently sent it to me, and I append it for your interest - slightly oddly sorted by initial initial of author (my fault, not the lady's!).

The Strangers (The Outsider)	Albert Camus
The Color Purple	Alice Walker
Howl	Allen Ginsberg
A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess
Bleak House	Charles Dickens
Inferno	Dante Alighieri
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Heartbreak House	George Bernard Shaw
1984	George Orwell
The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller
Moby Dick	Herman Melville
The Glass Bead Game	Hermann Hesse
Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
Dubliners	James Joyce
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad
Catch 22	Joseph Heller
The Awakening	Kate Chopin
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
The Handmaid's Tale	Margaret Atwood
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes
Barney's Version	Mordechai Richler
The Time and the Place	Naguib Mahfouz
Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde
Collected Poems	Robert Frost
Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie
Krapp's Last Tape	Samuel Beckett
The Red and the Black	Stendhal
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath
The Waste Land	T. S. Eliot
Gravity's Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon
Beloved	Toni Morrison
To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies	William Golding
Naked Lunch	William S. Burroughs
King Lear	William Shakespeare

Anyone read them all?  I've heard of either book or author or both in all but two cases (Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version, and Kate Chopin's Awakening), but would only claim to have read 23.  There are a couple of my very greatest favourites - Eliot and Austen - but not much poetry.  Of all the world's poetry, they pick Frost?  And Plath?  Give me a break! There's a clear North American bias, which is fair enough, but not much European literature - no Homer, no Virgil?  As the list was published under the heading of How to be well read, I think they might have some explaining to do there!  But the real purpose of these lists is not that people read the books, but that they talk about them and maybe find one or two new authors.  So, a challenge - pick one of the books on here you haven't read, and tell Booksdofurnisharoom about it!

Dwem index

My selection of eight books for the traditional desert island, which I called Lindsay's Canon, scored high on the dwem index – dead white European males – and I gave myself the challenge of finding a more diverse group of eight writers I’d genuinely be happy to be marooned with.

The original group consisted of Borges, Homer, T S Eliot, Jane Austen, Kipling, Donne, Le Carre and Anthony Powell, which scores a massive 28 on the index (one point for each characteristic, with a maximum score for all eight books of 32).   Only Le Carre is alive, only Austen is female, and only Borges is non-European (and that’s only just true) and not white.  I felt I had to consider Eliot an European through his own choice to work and write in England.  While not accepting for a moment any intrinsic virtue for a writer in being female, non-white, non-European or even (only qua writer) alive, I thought I’d try and do better.  Bearing in mind that I had to have read and enjoyed them – not just heard of them – and that they should stand much re-reading, this is what I came up with:

·        Robertson Davies  The Deptford Trilogy:  Davies is a fine, slightly old fashioned novelist who I much enjoy. He has a habit of writing trilogies, in which three novels are closely connected and mutually enriching, rather than being essential sequences to each other.  The first novel of this trilogy, Fifth Business, is particularly fine – and I recently also enjoyed Tempest-Tost, the first novel of the Salterton Trilogy.

·        Margery Allingham  Sweet Danger:   Perhaps the finest writer of the great era of crime writing; Sayers can be as good but is affected and her hero is too perfect for words; Ngaio Marsh is funny and clever, but looks very period and patronising now; and Agatha Christie couldn’t write.  But Allingham has a delicate touch, a wonderful eye for character and place, almost Dickensian in its intensity and vigour – and her heroes are very engaging.   She describes the police – who are effective and central in many of her books, not bumbling amateurs as so often in this period – much more realistically than any of the others.  And she tells a super story - this is one, Tiger in the Smoke is another.

·        Mary Wesley  The Vacillations of Poppy Carew:   A very funny writer who is a constant inspiration to me – she is one of the few writers left who started writing at an age greater than I have so far reached!!  I feel that many consider this fiction for a female audience, a kind of very superior chick lit, but I think her perceptiveness, her joie de vivre and her lovely style make it better than that.

·        Orhan Pamuk  My Name is Red:   This is a fantastic novel, but I have found other writing by Pamuk, notably Snow, very heavy going.  He writes wonderfully, with great intensity, and is unafraid to tackle very difficult and politically sensitive issues, such as militant Islam or the Kurdish question.  I read My Name is Red in Istanbul, where it's set: a fabulous murder mystery is set in a much broader, deeper novel about the nature of power and patronage, and uses the debate over painting – to continue with the old Persian techniques of miniature painting, or to adopt techniques from the west such as perspective and realistic portraiture – to carry a wealth of fascinating detail and discussion.

·        Gunter Grass  Tin Drum:   A little old fashioned now, but still immensely evocative and mocking of the crazy pre-war years in Germany, although Grass’s liberal credentials have been slightly sullied in recent years.  Some of his other novels, especially The Flounder, which is a feminist cookery book in disguise, are also very fine.  However, he can be a bit bizarre on first reading – you need time to “tune in”.

·        Tom Stoppard  Arcadia:   The ultimate wordsmith, great fun to see on stage, but even better to read and savour.  It’s very hard to pick a favourite Stoppard, but this or The Invention of Love, a very moving play about A E Housman, are probably mine.

·        Kazuo Ishiguro  A Pale View of Hills: Ishiguro is a perceptive novelist of, typically, gentle sadness and regret.  His works are beautiful but might, after much re-reading, lose their lustre, I fear.  This novel, and The Remains of the Day with its splendid portrait of the butler regretting his past, but without really realising it, are the ones I am most likely to want to read again.

·        Seamus Heaney  District and Circle:  I needed a poet, and Heaney is my choice for the challenge he always poses, the strength and vigour of his lines, but also for his accessibility.  His poems have a physical presence which I find very sympathetic, as in these lines from The Blackbird of Glanmore:

"Hedge-hop, I am absolute

For you, your ready talkback,

Your each stand-offish comeback,

Your picky, nervy goldbeak -

On the grass when I arrive,

In the ivy when I leave."

Still precious few women, and they’re mostly white, but five of them are still alive and three are non-European. This list scores 20 out of 32, a marked improvement, though I find it much less comfortable to think that they might be all I had through a prolonged isolation.  I could do much “better” by choosing works I’ve read and enjoyed but which I personally don’t expect to revisit very often – such as Toni Morrison, for example.  On my desert island, I might have to adopt Disraeli’s tactic: “When I want to read a novel, I write one”!

I’m sure there are people out there who think I’m missing great candidates (and I’m sure they’re right), so please tell me.  Harriet Devine should easily be able to offer me eight female writers, for example, or Equiano some African ones!

Arrangement for shelves and books

How do you arrange your books, I was asked?  Well, there is always some pragmatism – what fits where, et cetera, but in an ideal world, I keep literature and fiction (separately) in alphabetical order; history is in rough chronological order; and maps are grouped by country and continent.  Other stuff – literary criticism, science, philosophy, natural history, travel  - are grouped together and ordered by alphabet or chronology or geography as seems convenient.

But there are a lot of puzzles remaining, some of which I will never satisfactorily solve, and some to which my answers will doubtless enrage some of you.

·        Whether, and if so how, to distinguish between literature and fiction? I do, but my rationale is very suspect.  I instinctively feel that Jane Austen and Agatha Christie are different things, so I create two categories.  But in fiction goes some very fine writing – Michael Innes, Margery Allingham, Philip Pullman – which is clearly superior to some of the so called serious fiction.  But in literature I have John Le Carre, whereas almost all the other thrillers, murder mysteries, spy stories are in fiction.  I then have the most difficult category of all, authors whose output is split, such as G K Chesterton, whose Father Brown stories are in fiction, but whose other novels are in literature.  I know it doesn’t make sense, but I’m not reconciled to having them all in one mass.  The only vaguely acceptable solution might be to split by genre, but that means putting Umberto Eco and Wilkie Collins with C S Forester and Ruth Rendell, which doesn’t seem right.  Anyway, I know where everything is, and it roughly fits on the shelves allocated at the moment!

·        Poetry and drama – should it be separate; I used to do this, but what to do with Homer, who is often translated into verse and often into prose?  And I hate to split an author who writes both, like Kipling or Chesterton or Borges.

·        Translations and adaptations; Homer is again the problem – when to file under ‘H’ and when under the translator’s name?  Pope, Logue and Baricco all merit this question.

·        Outsize books – you can’t just put everything in the right place – I have huge editions of Cervantes and Eliot, for example, which would just waste space.  Frankly, I tend to be pragmatic, and see how many big books are on a shelf together – and all the really outsize books are just on the bottom shelf with the most rudimentary sorting  - art, poetry, birds, and Doonesbury (the only cartoons in the house).

·        Double stacking – never!!

·        Which comes first, volume one or volume two?  I sort left to right, Dickens before Eliot – but when you have a multi-volume work, starting with volume one seems logical, but the book loses its coherence – the first page of volume 1 is next to the last page of volume 2, instead of vice versa.  So I, following the practice in some ancient libraries, put the volumes together as a complete book, and keep that relationship intact on the shelf, meaning that volumes run right to left – but a bookworm munching through from the beginning of volume one will eat all the pages in the correct order until the very end of the last volume!!

Apologies to all the librarians out there suffering from apoplexy or worse!

Holiday reading

Planning my reading for a major holiday is always difficult.  Before I go, I want to read about the country, and when I actually travel, I want to have reference books (guides, maps, bird books - although I realise not everyone regards the last as essential), local colour - whether it be fiction or non-fiction, and some escape reading for tired moments.  Always, my eyes are bigger than my reading capacity or my luggage, and heart breaking decisions have to be made.  The trip I'm thinking about at present is to Namibia, though it's weeks away, and I've accumulated at least some (too many!) of the necessary books.

Above are the bare essentials - though I may be tough on myself and leave the guide to South Africa - I'm only going to be there three days and I will be with friends who live there.  But the bird book alone weighs 2 lbs!  Below are the results of a raid on the London Library, which has all sorts of magical things tucked away in odd corners.  I've got the three Bushmen books I posted on a few days ago, including Laurens van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari, a history of an anti-German revolt by the Herero people of (what is now) northern Namibia in 1904, and two volumes of the Proceedings of the Van Riebeeck Society (just amazing to find these up a thousand staircases in the Library, one of them last taken out in 1981) publishing the journals of travellers and missionaries from 1724, 1761, and the mid-nineteenth century.

Finally, I have ordered a few more specifically Namibian books - two novels and a book about the conservation of the black rhino.  And (really finally) I shall take a couple of old favourites from my own shelves, or buy cheap editions of them with a view to abandoning them en route - you may be able to see that I can't travel without the blessed Jane.  What I actually take will be decided the evening before my flight (or possibly the next morning) - and if any of them are of particular interest, I will post separately about them.  I don't read every word of all these of course - I'll pick up the more arcane books while the kettle is boiling, or over breakfast, or in bath or bed, and I'll skim, dip, and browse: often this will make me read the book properly, but with a lengthy academic book, or the prosy memoirs of a C19th missionary, it's often enough to get the mood and flavour.

Library Book

I recently bought, from the London Library, a small book by Tony McIntyre, one of the trustees, simply called Library Book.  It's about the architecture and history of the London Library, and it's a little gem.  If you know the Library, it's an added layer of interest and pleasure in what is clearly a magnificent but slightly eccentric institution; if you don't, it's still full of both architectural and bibliophilic anecdotes.

The library is a million volumes strong, almost all of which can be borrowed and taken home - and unless another members requests one of your books, they are very generous about loan times.  The present institution, a veritable architectural palimpsest in the corner of St James' Square, has grown steadily since it was founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841.  Past Presidents have included Carlyle himself, Tennyson, H A L Fisher, and Lord Clark; the current incumbent is Tom Stoppard.  The library is very old-fashioned in some ways - comfortable reading room, plumbing which has a heavy vitreous quality which exhorts you to remember the great days of Empire, cast iron book stacks, and a classification system which owes nothing to Mr Dewey.  But the collection grows steadily - 8,000 volumes are added every year - and the catalogue is computerised and efficient.  The Library throws nothing away, which means they often have books you cannot find anywhere else, but also that an aimless bummel along the stacks can lead to wonderful serendipities.

McIntyre's anecdotes include Arthur Ransome - yes, he of Swallows and Amazons - using an angry letter from the librarian on impressive headed paper to get past intransigent officials in St Petersburg (where he was writing for the Manchester Guardian), and the redoubtable Mr Cox on the front desk, treating all comers with Cockney equality - finishing a discussion with one member after saying to an importunate member, "One moment, if you please, Miss Sitwell.."!

Writing this, another library came to mind, a fictional one from Michael Innes' Secret Vanguard, Dr Borer's Library in Mecklenberg Square, where the librarian Tufton has "a great deal of work on hand since Dr Borer died".  Only slowly do you find out that this sad event occurred in 1877, and Tufton is still editing his journals and correspondence in 1939!  The stairs are so crammed with piles of books that visitors "would have been the better for a chart"; and Tufton, on hearing of the death of a modern poet remarks "Dear, dear.  The poets are all departing from us.  Meredith gone, and that fat fellow Rossetti, and now this lad Ploss."  As Ploss himself remarks in his diary (found after his death, a vital clue), what a blessing to be led to this haven.

Good reviews of bad books

Did you see Howard Davies' comments on reviews a week or so ago?  Davies, chairman of the Man Booker judges this year, said that reviewers were often too inclined to praise works by established authors, and not open enough to new writing.  That created a bit of a furore, but I have some sympathy: it's less common than it ought to be to read a review which is critical of a living great (not necessarily pans it, just says, not his greatest).  Most authors are human, after all, and the standard is bound to go up and down a bit!  To give (some of) his exact words:

“There appear to be some novels where people leave their critical faculties at home. They decide ‘so and so is a great novelist’ or ‘an up-and-coming novelist’, and give them the reverential treatment,” he said.

Recalling reviews for Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, he said: “Jeanette Winterson’s book is an odd book, unlike anything she’s written before and, in my view, doesn’t come off. Yet it was treated with absolute kid gloves by pretty well everybody.”

Too many critics, he said, shied away from real criticism. “The only way you can detect that the reviewer doesn’t like the book is when they spend the whole time simply describing the plot. They’re not brave enough to say, ‘It doesn’t work’. [They] are tolerant of untidy novels. They don’t care whether they’re readable or not.”

I make no comment on the Winterson, which I know nothing about.  But my attention was caught by this, from Sandra Parsons in The Times, under the heading Wise Words:

"The reason I am never going to read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year but didn’t win) is because his previous novel Saturday received rave reviews when it was in fact mediocre. The sense of betrayal when you buy a book because of the review, only to find it dull, ill-written or unreadable, is huge. Which is why, despite never having met him, I now worship Sir Howard Davies, chairman of this year’s Man Booker, for saying what the book-buying masses have known for years: never judge a book by its review."

I've really enjoyed McEwan before - especially Enduring Love - but I so agreed with Parsons on this one;  I looked at a lot of reviews when Chesil Beach came out, and I was impressed by their tone, and predisposed to like the book - both from my familiarity with his earlier work, and also because I really like Chesil Beach itself (there, isn't that a bad reason for reading a book!).  But ten minutes in a bookshop looking through the book made me sure I would never buy it, and never read it:  I thought it grotesque and extremely unattractive.  Whether you agree with me or not is almost irrelevant, because I'm very prepared to admit that there will be people who find it sensitive and fulfilling as a novel - but the point is that I don't recall seeing a review which was critical at all (though I'm open to correction on that, I don't read them all by any means).

But, finally, it gives me an excuse for quoting the angry X Trapnel, from Books Do Furnish A Room by Anthony Powell, on reviewers:

"How one envies the rich quality of a reviewer's life. All the things to which those Fleet Street Jesuses feel superior. Their universal knowledge, exquisite taste, idyllic loves, happy married life, optimism, scholarship, knowledge of the true meaning of life, freedom from sexual temptation, simplicity of heart, sympathy for the masses, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity - particularly the last, in welcoming with open arms every phoney who appears on the horizon. It's not surprising that in the eyes of most reviewers a mere writer's experiences seem so often trivial, sordid, lacking in meaning."

Wow!  If in any doubt, of course, you can rely on a small selection of carefully written, honest blogs - even if we are all a little idiosyncrastic (or ignorant) at times!  Happy reading!

Buzbee's bookshop

A visiting friend recently gave me Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, which he describes as “a memoir, a history”.  It’s an engaging wander through the world of bookshops, book salesmen, publishers, etc, set in California over the past three decades.  The subject matter is of itself interesting, and he writes very pleasantly – though it is striking that he speaks a different language to me, and I found many words and phrases which were unknown or just a bit unclear – for example, exactly what is a fern bar? (OK, thanks, I've looked it up now).

I thought the light, slightly whimsical character of the book was slightly more suited to essays rather than a full length book, and I think this would work well left on a coffee table or by a bedside, and browsed when the mood was right.  Reading it continuously, I didn’t quite feel the matter was weighty enough for the form.

But some of the chapters are delightful - on browsing, on the nature of books, and on the history of bookshops.  Others are less compelling - on the economics of publishing, on censorship, on chain stores;  I found some of his explanations and information a little surprising, not least his statement that, until the at least the 1980s, bookshops in the UK arranged their stock by publisher, so you couldn't browse by subject, and couldn't find a book if you didn't know the publisher?  News to me (with the exception of small specialist 'libraries' like Loeb Classics) - and this highlights one real issue with this book, that the author's world is almost totally defined by California and Paris, and he seems unaware of much outside.  Which doesn't matter for whimsy and book gossip, but does for more serious discussions.

A propos of nothing at all, I loved the anecdote about the customer who wanted a book called Roger the Sorcerer (you know these guys, "it's quite big and I think it's red, I saw it on that TV show last week"); turns out he wanted Roget's Thesaurus.  I wonder how he even knew he wanted it?

Norman Lewis

I came across Norman Lewis first through his travel writing; an entirely serendipitous discovery found me reading A Dragon Apparent when I was in Cambodia a couple of years ago, and I then kept coming across references to him as one of the finest of travel writers.  A Dragon Apparent is about Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia (the top picture is of the great temple at Angkor Wat); it was written in 1951, and republished by the impressive Eland.  It shows a dedicated interest in the politics and reality of the country, rather than the incidental and trivial amusements of foreigners or of travel itself, which seems to be the staple of so much 'travel writing' today.  I can honestly say that it changed my view of French colonialism, and of l’Indochine in particular – exposing the cynicism and weariness of the French governing class, while not being blinded by any automatic or thoughtless admiration for the local people.  It was a fine read, and I will read Lewis again when I travel to places he has written about – perhaps I won’t even need that excuse; his other best known travel books are on Sicily, Naples and Burma.  Golden Earth, the title of the book on Burma, is terrible indictment of the brutality and ignorance that passes for government there today.

I found out that Lewis wrote fiction as well by seeing Flight from a Dark Equator on the returns shelf at the London Library; it also appealed because, set in Colombia, it dealt with the very real difficulties of doing good in a corrupt, violent, hugely prejudiced and often unwelcoming society, something I had some sight of in Afghanistan.  The prose style of this book is quite similar to that of A Dragon Apparent – spare, straightforward, unemotional in tone, relying utterly on content.  It may be a style more suited to non-fiction, but I found it effective here too. It is not emotionally engaging, but it is clear, tense and strong.  Much action is described - though some key events happen in the cracks between chapters - but his real interest is the conflict between decency and pragmatism, and the corruption which reaches all people, not just the conventional imperialist bad guys, the US and the multinationals.  He is unsparing of the catholic church and of the indescribably blind, devious and naive Grail Williams, the evangelical missionary - with a wife who is not so blind, so biddable, or so weak as he thinks and hopes.

But the main story centres on Robert Howel, sent to Colombia by the aid organisation SUCCOUR to evaluate their efforts (futile) and bring home Liz Sayers, one of their workers who has been getting unacceptably involved in local politics, then swaying into militaty dictatorship (the second picture is of one of Noriega's headquarters in Panama City, the nearest I could get to Colombia).  They fall in love, in a slightly wooden and clockwork way, and the emotional tension this should generate never quite comes off.  And there is a parallel sub-plot of some aspiring guerrillas who aim to get the local Indians on the side of the revolution - a chilling section is the one in which American helicopter pilots enthuse over the success of their raid on a village suspected of harbouring militants: the village is completely destroyed, and over 200 people are deliberately lured out into the open by presents dropped from the air, then shot and burned indiscriminately:  "We cleared up and got out, and nobody got hurt.  It was clean and quick"; thankfully, his fellow pilot is sickened by what he has done, and by his colleague's reactions. The two strands don't always weave easily together, but for all it's faults, Flight from a Dark Equator is a fascinating read, and it's depressing how little appears to have changed in some parts of the world since this was first published in 1972.

Books without roofs

I came across a fascinating article in last Saturday's FT, about a mobile library service for homeless people in south London.  It shattered quite a lot of misconceptions, and struck me as a brilliant idea.  It runs just like a conventional library, except that the books are donated or bought with donations, and the borrowers are homeless.  They read everything, apparently, from Danielle Steel to George Orwell, in English and other languages, and it seems to have provided a road back to normality for some, and a welcome stimulus and escape for others.  And they return the books.

You might like to read the FT article, and the details of Quaker Homeless Action's service are here.

Reading light

Has everybody seen this amazing story, of a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, which may enable us to read ancient texts which are too fragile to unroll, such as parts of the Dead Sea scrolls and other manuscripts which have been damaged by damp, fire, or merely time.  I have no idea what the books in this picture are, but with the new invention, you'll surely be able to read them and let me know!

Sacred texts

This afternoon, I visited the British Library's Sacred exhibition, a wonderful collection of books from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three religions of the Abrahamic tradition, the members of which are collectively known to Moslems as 'the people of the book'. 

A number of these items are extremely beautiful - some highly decorated, some extremely simple; some seem in a magical way to be both.  But to a book lover, they are wonderful but slightly unreal - it's hard to believe that these texts were in daily use, some are too grand and rich, some are too small or too impractical, and some are in such excellent condition that they've never apparently been subject to any rough and tumble.  But they are full of interest, even to someone like myself who is not a member of any of the religions represented.  And although, being educated in England in a reasonably traditional way, I've a stronger background knowledge of Christianity than of the other two, I have just spent a year in a Moslem country.

Several  points struck me immediately.  First, our distance from all three original texts - in the first case of the exhibition, I could read none of the books, as I read no Greek, no Hebrew, and no Arabic; and even later Latin and English texts are extremely demanding; there was certainly no sense for me in which the Christian texts were accessible in ways the others were not.  Second, there were a number of surprises - a Gospels in Arabic, for example, or a Hebrew marriage contract from Herat in Afghanistan - evidence that these three strands of history have intermingled freely throughout history.

It's almost impossible to make a selection from the riches - but I'll try, with three books just as examples of the many treasures there:  beautiful naturalistic illustrations in the Golden Haggadah, a Jewish Genesis from about 1320; Sultan Baybar's Qur'an, made in Cairo in 1304-06, magnificent, rich and golden, yet clear, restrained and elegant at the same time; and the Lindisfarne Gospels, an Anglo-Saxon masterpiece from the late C7th or early C8th.

The pictures in this post are not from the exhibition; there are three general pictures, one from each tradition, and one frontispiece from my own oldest book, a King James Bible of 1611 - of no financial value, as it's very badly damaged, is missing several books, and is - as you can see - heavily graffitoed: but it is still a very fine book to own, which came to me through my father's family, although it only came into their possession in the C19th, I believe.

But back to the British Library exhibition: if you go (and it finishes soon) allow at least two hours - I did and I'm going back - and take a woolly, it's jolly cold!  You can see a selection of eight of the marvellous works in their exhibition by visiting the British Library's Turning The Pages feature.  It's really spectacular - you'll need to install Shockwave if you don't already have it - but you can literally turn the pages, see great reproductions, hear an audio commentary or read a textual one, or listen to a recitation (interestingly, 'bible' means 'book', but 'Qur'an' mean 'recitation').  It's quite the finest bookish use of the web I've seen so far!

No such thing as a free book?

I am grateful to Harriet for pointing out that The Book Depository was giving away a limited number of free books to bloggers.  I put my name in, and am rewarded with a copy of Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names, which I shall read and review as soon as it arrives.  I know nothing about it at all, so it could be a big surprise!

Hotel reading

On a recent trip to Bath (upcoming posts on Bath itself and on reading Jane Austen while there), I stayed in a very expensive hotel which had been highly recommended in a boutique guide.  After a long walk round the town, I returned to my room to find the late evening sunshine picking out the hotel's offered reading on the fireplace. 

I am to piles of books as a moth is to a flame, so I went across and had a look.  And in this city (it feels like a city, but has no cathedral?) of gorgeous regency architecture, of the great Jane Austen, and with wondrous remains of both Roman and medieval civilisation, they offered me Hannibal Lector and Maeve Binchy.  Really!  The best written books here are almost certainly those written for children, by Pullman and Morpugo, the rest is just appalling.

By contrast, one of the lovely things about staying in a house owned by the Landmark Trust, apart from the sheer pleasure of the buildings and their locations, is the attention to detail.  In every property there is a collection of books - novels, poetry, biography and autobiography, maybe of history or science or art - that reflects the area; there are books writtten by local authors, by people visiting, books set in the region, etc.  Apart from Austen, my hotel could have offered me relevant Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Sheridan and many others.  And there is an excellent book which the bookish might like to consult when travelling, though I'm not aware if it's been reprinted since its original publication in 1977 - The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles, by Dorothy Eagle and Hilary Cornell, which allows you to look up a place and find its real and fictional literary associations.  I was given my copy by Mr Cornflower in 1977, complete with a Greek inscription I can no longer read!

Lindsay's Canon

Some of you will have noticed a new list, a little way down on the right hand side, called Lindsay's Canon.  I have always been attracted by the idea of a canon of literature, an unfashionable one now.  Simply, the idea of the canon is that there are some essential books, which we all need to know to be part of the culture.  Clearly, this is dynamic - the classics have declined and non-European literature has become more essential - and also personal, but there clearly was a time, probably up to the early twentieth century, when cultured people had a very large body of reading in common, reinforcing its value and richness.  The timing of Eliot's Waste Land in 1922, a cry of despair for western culture, is no accident.

But, by definition, a canon is exclusive - and in the sixties, accusations that it was populated by dead white European males to the exclusion of women, blacks, and non-Christians to name just a few, gained ground.  I was greatly influenced in the opposite direction by reading Loose Canons, an exploration of these themes by a prominent black American scholar, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and by the irrepressible Howard Bloom's The Western Canon.  They argue, in very different ways, that there is such a thing as good literature, and we should welcome it wherever we find it, even accepting dead white Europen males - but also of course, many others.

My list, Lindsay's Canon, is a light hearted attempt to define a personal canon, and I've done it by choosing eight authors (as in Desert Island Discs!) that I would find it hard to be without.  I've excluded some wonderful and much loved work, and I don't pretend these are the eight greatest books ever, or even the best that I've read.  I'm just saying that if my library had to be reduced to eight books today, these are the ones I would keep - I think.  Maybe I'll do eight without a single dead white European male one day as well.

• Homer:  for me, irresistible, and the only classical author I still read regularly.  Although I think the Iliad is the greater work, I've chosen the Odyssey because of its greater variety, and the number of wonderful stories contained within it;
• Borges: such a master of language and thought, and tiny jewel like works which contain the world.  I couldn't decide which volume was my favourite, so I have cheated and chosen his collected stories, Fictions;
• Le Carre: I love this man's writing, and rate Little Drummer Girl as one of the best spy thrillers ever written, but it's edged out here by Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, possibly the first spy story to be a respectable novel in it's own right;
• Donne: another 'collected', this time his poems, although the sermons (especially Death's Duel) also have a claim.  My favourite poems are the seven linked sonnets of La Corona, which start "Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise";
• Austen: for me, the greatest novelist of them all.  Probably Pride and Prejudice is my favourite and the best, but I have chosen Mansfield Park because it is a very close second for me personally, and gets much less attention;
• Kipling: to my mind, the finest short story teller ever, with fantastic range and amazing empathy and passion; picking one volume was very hard, but I've chosen the late Limits and Renewals for its variety, grief, passion and comedy in different stories, and even an account of the operations of Heaven; Dayspring Mishandled is the most amazing story of love and forgery;
• Powell: I think you will know my views on Powell by now, a wonderful writer of illuminating, understated comedy; here I have picked The Military Philosophers, but I wanted the whole of Dance to the Music of Time and The Fisher King  - but I wouldn't allow myself!
• T S Eliot: I have chosen poetry, and being able to get The Waste Land and Four Quartets in together was a bonus, though it's the first I regard as essential.  I really wanted Murder in the Cathedral as well ("I am not in danger, only near to death") but I felt I couldn't have all the poetry and plays.  Here I've picked a CD with Eliot himself reading, flat and unemphatic - but utterly compelling.

Perhaps if people are interested, we could throw this idea around a bit - I bet we get a lot of different books, with a lot more women writers and non-Europeans than I have - but let's see.  Perhaps Cornflower would like to start us off with her eight books, and then tag someone else?

No Such Thing As A Zebra?

No such thing as a zebra?  Sure there is, it's an African animal, black with white stripes.  Or maybe, a white animal with black stripes?  But, who's asking damn fool questions, when there's a group of them right there!

Well, who's asking the question is Stephen jay Gould in his essay What, If Anything, Is a Zebra?  I wrote about Gould recently in The Science of Writing.  It's a simple question which Gould writes about to illustrate a wider point: that there is no perfect way of classifying organisms, even though there must be a "right answer" if only we knew enough about evolutionary descent.  In his words,

"The potential dilemma for zebras is simply stated: they exist as three species, all with black-and-white stripes to be sure, but differing notably in both numbers of stripes and their patterns. ... Do these three species form a single evolutionary unit? Do they share a common ancestor that gave rise to them alone and to no other species of horse? Or are some zebras more closely related by descent to true horses or to asses than they are to other zebras? If this second possibility is an actuality, ... there is, in an important evolutionary sense, no such thing as a zebra."

To give an extreme example from human life, all redheads are not more closely related to each other than to their parents and siblings!  In fact, Gould concludes that the issue is not proven, that zebras may be a complete group, that the word "zebra" may really mean something precise and biological, but that it may not.

Just to doubly confound us, the same is apparently true of two other common terms - there is certainly no such thing as a fish!  Or a tree!

To quote from Ennos' Trees,

"..trees are not what biologists call a natural group. Whereas other successful groups of plants, such as grasses, all descend from a single common ancestor, the tree form has evolved many times in the course of history; their ancestors were quite unrelated plants."

In fact, there are trees which are grasses, roses, mosses, and clovers, and many, many more.

And to go back to zebras, in How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes, Gould concludes - on evidence from embroyology and pigmentation - that the zebra is a black animal with white stripes, not the other way round.

Map me no maps

Of course, not everything on our shelves, or everything we read, is a book.  One of my great pleasures is looking at maps, to plan a journey, or to understand one.  Maps  - and this is my collection here, a bit overpowered by the Ordnance Survey's magenta - are not neutral: they may be accurate, but they make statements about where the centre of the world is, what is important; they omit and they emphasise; they assert and deny ownership and control.

I remember a wonderful exhibition of maps at the British Library some years ago. As the world has been better explored, maps have been less and less technically wrong - but a curved surface portrayed on a flat one always exaggerates some areas, shrinks others.  Africa is much bigger than we all think, Britain is smaller.  And then there are the judgements masquerading as cartography - a map of Victorian London with streets coloured for social class and wealth; the lowest category was "criminal"!  Nazi maps of European cities showing Jewish areas evoke similar horror.  Thus, perhaps, Fielding's exclamation:  "Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world".

Borges has a wonderful passsage on the perfect map, in A Universal History of Infamy, a book (like all of Borges), which I thoroughly recommend for its wonderful writing, fantastic perception, and piercing illumination of the human mental condition.  Enjoy The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate or the moody, almost hard boiled Streetcorner Man.  I will return to Borges, for sure, one day, but now, here is the whole of his Of Exactitude in Science:

"…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of
the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these
Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the
Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the
Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the
Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the
whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."