Recycling

I recently collected a load of books from my parents' attic.  There was an odd collection of my things left up there.  I thought I'd already cleared out all my school and college notes but I unearthed yet more, which demonstrated that once I could, up to a point, understand chemical equations of blast furnaces and translate Latin poetry, all of which has since become mysterious again.  The best thing I found was a short story neatly written in sparse French, which was the kind of thing designed to demonstrate the competent use of several tenses, but pleasingly included a wandering chicken, an unlikely coincidence and a moral at the end.

I also found my English Lit A Level books, heavily marked with cryptic notes and, on 'Wuthering Heights', bat drawings.  One of the books I wrote my coursework on, half my life ago, was 'City of the Mind' by Penelope Lively.  This is where I learned the word 'palimpsest'.  I fished it out of the bookshelf on Sunday, after the search for where Miss Silvester's house used to be.   

Matthew Halland, an architect in London, takes his daughter on weekend expeditions, visits building sites of office blocks and half-renovated Georgian terraces, reflects on the death of one relationship and the tentative beginnings of another, his past and the long turbulent past of the city.  Other stories appear, in snippets, of other people at other times in the same places.

"He is alone, and at the same time less alone.  He sees that time is what we live in, but that it is also what we carry within us.  Time is then, but it is also our own perpetual now.  We bear it in our heads and on our backs; it is our freight, our baggage, our Old Man of the Sea.  It grinds us down and buoys us up.  We cannot shuffle it off; we would be adrift without it.  We both take it with us and leave ourselves behind within it - flies in amber, fossilized admonitions and exemplars."  Penelope Lively, 'City of the Mind'   

I lost the essay long ago, I think, unless it is under another layer of old magazines, posters, notes and letters.  Are they worth keeping because they are worth keeping, or only because they have been kept for so long now?  Some of the books I gave away, One particularly destroyed book went into the recycling box.  Mostly I kept them, to read again in other places, later.

Listing / Learning

It would be nice to think that we are due an Indian summer, but at the moment I'm sitting in front of a light box, which will hopefully convince my body clock that it is not a time for hibernation.  September is a time of new beginnings, new stationery, new projects and excellent food, but this year it is feeling damp and cold.  I want to make pumpkin soup and knit, and not do much else.   

Over the summer I read "The Sword in the Stone":

"But in the Old England there was a greater marvel still.  The weather behaved itself.
In the spring, the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang.  In the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed.  In the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory.  And in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush."  T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

This is a great description of how we sometimes imagine the past to have been, although the winters certainly used to be colder in the Little Ice Age.  And this year there has been some kind of summer, albeit sporadically.  In 1816, 'the year without a summer', volcanic eruptions and low solar activity led to a cold, damp year.  Food shortages followed, leading to famine, civil disruption and disease.  Taking an umbrella on a day out is hardly that bad really. 

(The gardens at Arundel Castle, August 2011)

One of the reasons why I wanted to read The Sword in the Stone (apart from the Disney film), is that I read a quote from it in an interview on Gretchen Rubin's great site the Happiness Project.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.  You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.  There is only one thing for it then - to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."  Also T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

And learning is what September is all about.   

Novel Ideas

I’ve been reading mainly non-fiction for a while now.  I have bad fiction-reading habits – for a long time I would read half a book and become distracted.  Once I did this with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and left a character down a well for six months.  At least I did come back to it.  I never finished The Blind Assassin, because I knew Something Awful was going to happen. 

Emotionally intense though non-fiction can also be, it doesn’t really have the same effect on me.  Last year I read Richard Holmes’ two part biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  The second book, Darker Reflections, (and, therefore, the second half of Coleridge’s life) was full of disappointments, financial and emotional difficulties, addiction and pain, but even though he was actually a real person who experienced these things, rather than a fictional character, it didn’t make me want to stop reading.

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve read a novel that I couldn’t stop reading*.  When I love a book I read it all the time, and also very fast indeed.  My all-time favourite novel is Under the Net by Iris Murdoch.  It is incredibly funny and cleverly plotted, and one of those books that I keep buying for other people in the hope that they will like it as much as I do.  I read it about once a year, and sometimes in 3 or 4 sittings.    

A representative sample of the books currently on my desk are:

Tree-Ring Dating and Archaeology – M.G.L.Baillie

Roman Britain – Martin Millett

Preserves – Pam Corbin

Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book

Katharine Hepburn – Sheridan Morley

What novel could get me back into a fiction habit?    

* Has anyone seen the film of Norweigan Wood yet?  Is it good??

Fifth Avenue to the Sargasso Sea

Quick! Today is Jules Verne's birthday (183rd) and the Google Doodle is an amazing interactive underwater view. You too can be Professor Pierre Aronnax.

I had thought that Prof. Aronnax was James Mason, but was thinking of him in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. James Mason is Captain Nemo, and with a beard.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea has one of the best armchair travel quotes I have ever read. Not, as you might think, his descriptions of deep water caverns or terrifying ice shelves, but his useful information about the route from the Fifth Avenue Hotel to the Brooklyn pier where his boat was moored.

"The carriage, available at a fixed fare of four dollars, went down Broadway as far as Union Square, proceeded along Fourth Avenue as far as its junction with Bowery Street, turned into Katrin Street, and pulled up at Pier 34. There, the Katrin Ferry transported us, men, horses and carriages, to Brooklyn, that great suburb of New York, situated on the left bank of the East River, and in a few minutes we arrived at the wharf where the Abraham Lincoln was belching clouds of black smoke from her two smokestacks."

Urgency AND accuracy. I do love Jules Verne.

Age of Wondering

It has been proved to be the coldest winter since I was much too small to remember, and there has been too much ice and not enough talking.

This year, because I am very very very lucky, I went to a hot and sunny place for a week, with lovely people and a suitcase with 4 jumpers in that I didn't need. In February next year I will look at pictures of the hot and sunny place, have a bath and retire to bed with a pina colada and a fat paperback.

And shall we do this? Because it would be excellent.

(Some) Books of the Year (2002 mostly, it seems)

And so we come to the end of 2009, and also to the end of the decade we (rightly) hesitated to call the noughties.

I wasn't really prepared for the end-of-the-decade thing this time, as the last one was also the end of a century and of the millenium and so was heralded with nostalgia, smugness and predictions of technological meltdown and apocalyptic doom.

I do not have my ear to the ground or my finger on the pulse or my anything else on the whatever of the zeitgeist, so cannot give a definitive top [insert number, preferably multiple of 5 or 10] [insert cultural experience of choice] of 2009.

I can, however, exclusively reveal the list you have all been waiting for (subconsciously, probably, but waiting nonetheless):

5 Good Books I Have Read This Year.

Exciting stuff.

In no particular order then:

1. The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future by Jenny Uglow.
This is really, really good, and there is plenty (500+) pages of it (and with pictures). A group biography of members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which includes Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles, polymath), Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly and James Watt.

2. Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
This was Whitbread Book of the Year 2002 (see?) and is marvellous.

3. Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Neurological case studies of music and the mind. Very interesting indeed.

4. The Golden Age of Couture, Paris and London 1949-57 ed Claire Wilcox
Absolutely gorgeous big dresses. Beautifully cut tweed suits. Yum.

5. The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
All of Douglas Coupland's books are good, but some are too sad for me to read. This one is quite sad, and is also very funny.



These are not all the books I have read. They may not be the top 5 - I'm not sure. I also read Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark by Haruki Murakami as well as Norwegian Wood, and I read (sections of) lots of Political Philosophy books for work. I note that mostly I have been reading non-fiction and this is interesting. I shall go on as I started, as I have just launched into Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

So there you are. Furnish your Christmas list with listingslightly. Coming up, some music released sometime which I have listened to somewhere at some point, collated for your enjoyment.

Isn't it good

Finally I have read Norwegian Wood. I have read lots of other books by Haruki Murakami, and bought this rather special edition years ago, but was scared to read it. For lots of reasons I think - partly that the edition was a bit too special to actually read, partly that it's good to know that you haven't yet read all the books by an author you love, and partly that I thought it would be very good and make me sad.

I borrowed it from the library. It is very good and it did make me a bit sad, but I'm glad I read it, although now I don't want to read anything else for a while.

Interestingly, it's being made into a film at the moment. I shall keep my fingers crossed.

In the meantime, here is a list from the Times about Haruki Murakami.