Sunday, May 30, 2021

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!

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