A few books

Here's a juxtaposition of books that have been absorbing me recently. I bought none of them and borrowed none from a library because they were all on our shelves at home. Some I had read before, some not.

At the moment I am discovering Xenophon's Anabasis (ᾰ̓νᾰ́βᾰσῐς): The March Up Country, in a 19th century translation from the ancient Greek. It was the (approximately) 2,400 year-old equivalent of a blog, the story recorded in short episodes. This book I have in the kitchen so that I can pick it up to read during our meals at the kitchen table. In the living room is a similar, fatter book entitled 50 Great Journeys, a British anthology of famous historical adventures compiled in 1968 by a chap called John Canning. I also started reading Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds which is so eccentrically Irish I have trouble digesting it. Anthony Burgess was from an Irish family too, but more cosmopolitan in outlook and experience. I reread his dystopian novel The Wanting Seed the other day, and some of his autobiography.

Otherwise, this year, there were these to take my mind off my usual preoccupations ...

• Tolstoy's Anna Karenin
• Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
• Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul
• Margaret Atwood's relatively early novel, Surfacing
• Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (long ago one of the "set books" I had to read at school)
• William Golding's The Spire
• A Reginald Hill whodunnit, Recalled to Life
• Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Two of Bill Bryson's hilariously rude books: A Walk In The Woods and Notes From A Small Island
• Steinbeck's East of Eden
• A collection of Somerset Maugham stories
• A collection of Robert Fisk's articles: The Age of the Warrior
• Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter
• Most of Kipling's Debits and Credits (short stories written shortly after the first world war)
• Ustinov's The Old Man and Mr Smith. They are God and the Devil in disguise, on a rare visit to earth.
• Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Hard to digest because of the long sentences, shifting time sequences and multiple points of view.
• Philippa Pearce's children's book, Tom's Midnight Garden

What a mixture!