HaydninVienna's (Richard's) Ramblings in L-Space

I’m Richard. I live in Doha in Qatar and work for a financial regulator here, drafting regulatory rules.

I’ve started this topic to track my reading. I just counted the books on the top shelf of the nearest bookcase. There were 28, of which I’ve read 19. If that’s a reasonable sample, I probably have a thousand or so unread books. I have about 800 books here, probably another thousand in England and maybe another thousand in storage. Hooboy, better get started reading them.

I'm not planning on taking on any challenges. I just want to track what I read and comment on it. Visits and comments are welcome.

Last night I cleared the books off my coffee table. There were 14 partly-read books. All the others (about 30, at a guess) had not even been started.

The partly-read ones were:
The Pincers of Death by Toby Frost
Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett
The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P G Wodehouse
This Book Is Full of Spiders by David Wong
Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Wellmania by Brigid Delaney
A Spirit of Play by David Malouf
Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins

Well. I’ve always been a diverse reader but that list is ridiculous. This is what I remember about them.

The Pincers of Death by Toby Frost—this is the 6th and last book in a series. I’ve read the first 3 and I’m trying to read them in order, but they’re not easy to find outside England. The first one in the series (Space Captain Smith) was an absolute hoot if you didn’t look at its premise too closely, and Toby showed up to comment when the cover appeared on Good Show Sir. He sounded like a decent sort of bloke there, so I’m trying to help him buy his yacht.

Liberalism—The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett: I got increasingly depressed the further I got into this. Things being what they are at the moment, I’m not sure I want to read any more.

The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas: Don’t remember this too well. Vague recollections of homoeopathy and funny goings-on with an old manuscript.

An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant: This is very short and I stopped reading, as I recall, when Kant’s proposals lost touch with reality.

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P G Wodehouse: Would have been a re-read so probably doesn’t count.

This Book Is Full of Spiders by David Wong: I saw this recommended in a list of funny SF books. Not my idea of funny. It may be worth another go.

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan: I remember liking this so far as I went, and don’t now remember why I stopped.

Wellmania by Brigid Delaney: Sharp take-down of the wellness and self-help industry by an Australian journalist. Good as far as I read but episodic.

A Spirit of Play by David Malouf: David Malouf’s Boyer Lectures on what it means to be Australian. Another re-read. I loved this the first time around but I suspect that Australia has changed a bit since then, not necessarily for the better.

Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood: Another Australian writer. This is a kind of edgy cosy mystery, if there is such a thing (I mean, it has a bondage mistress and there’s a muffin recipe in the back). I stopped reading this when Corinna was about to go on a date with her ex, who obviously had something financially dubious in mind. Definitely worth another shot.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion; Everyone seems to love this, but Don is clearly in for some serious embarrassment. I think that was my problem.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers: Another book that everyone seems to love. Again, no clear idea why I stopped.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: I know exactly why I stopped reading this. It’s godawful dull. Even C S Lewis, its biggest fan, admitted somewhere that the battles were a bore. I would say that getting through this would be significantly more of an achievement than getting through War and Peace and Ulysses together, and I’ve read both of those.

Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins: Not feeling the comedy at the moment.
Hmm. touchstones not working.
(Edited to fix touchstones.)

So I began with Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, chortling idiotically the whole time. Absolute perfection. It’s probably true that Plum’s idyllic world has little to do with the world’s current problems. Neither does The Magic Flute or The Marriage of Figaro, but Mozart still has 3 operas among the 10 most frequently performed ones. Relevance becomes irrelevant in the face of such perfection.

I may have to retract (some of) my opinion of the Faerie Queene. This was what I took up next. I'm now up to the end of Book IV canto iii (606 pages in, out of 1,055). I have C S Lewis's English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), which not surprisingly has a lot to say about the Faerie Queene, and I read some of that last night. It's nerved me for the struggle a bit.

Just to change the subject: I don't have any pets so I can't post pictures of them, but my wife does. Here's one:

He's a bay gelding called Mo. (Not my wife riding him BTW. The picture was taken at Blenheim Palace a couple of years ago.) He's about 18 hands high and is getting on a bit--about 18 y o. He used to be a champion in some obscure horse sport that I've never understood (his official name is Manton), and his owners were going to put him out to grass, so my wife bought him for a tenner. She loves him dearly and so does everybody else--he's a really sweet, good-natured boy. I've never been a horse person but even I think he's OK, man.

She has a couple of other horses and I'll post some pictures when I can get them. I say again, I'm not a horse person so the horses are simply eye-candy for me.

>5 haydninvienna: He's beautiful. I have a good friend that has 3 horses, (Morgans), and they keep her busy. I love all types of animals including horses but I never had the desire to own one. Hard to cuddle up to one on a cold winter night unless you have the desire to rest in a barn. Give me a dog or a cat:)

>6 Carol420: Yes, he's a handsome big boy isn't he? We used to have a couple of dogs too. World's most expensive free dogs. We got them as puppies from a friend of my wife's who used to breed Jack Russell terriers. One of her bitches got out and had a meaningful interface with, we think, a red heeler (in Australia, the bred that's called an "Australian cattle dog" overseas is often called a blue heeler, and the familiar colour phase is black and grey, but there's also a tan phase which is often called a red heeler). So the resulting litter was Jack Russell tan and white but with spots like a heeler. Built like a heeler too, quite a bit bigger than a JR. The woman rang my wife and said we could have these two, else she would put them down, well knowing what the answer would be. When we moved to the UK in 2006 we had to quarantine them for 6 months after their rabies shots and them ship them to us in England. They are both gone now, died of old age a year or two ago.

And my mother was a cat person so I grew up with cats.

Interesting fact about - Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. The paperback copy glows in the dark. I was reading it before bed and when I turned off the light to go to sleep- the books on the cover were glowing. Welcome to the group!

>8 JulieLill: Okay...now I have to get the book and see if it glows or if it's your fertile imagination:)

>8 JulieLill: Thanks. and ... wow (i think). I'll try to remember to get it out tonight and check.

>8 JulieLill: You're absolutely right! At least for strips down the right-hand edge and the lower edge. How 'bout that now.

>11 haydninvienna: The book I had, had been sitting under my turned on lamp for awhile and I think that is what made it glow. Kinda of freaked me out when I noticed it.

I didn't post anything about my reading habits. There is really no reliable way of describing what I read; easier to describe what I won't read.

To start with, I'm a complete wuss about horror. Also about graphic descriptions of violence (or the results thereof), cruelty and such like. I'm liberal politically and pacifist by inclination so will have nothing to do with writing whose purpose is to glorify war and militarism. That doesn't preclude military history and other war writing as long as the purpose isn't propaganda. I used to be a reader of science fiction and have read most of the classics (Asimov, Clarke and so on) but lost touch with it some time in the 60s. Last encounter with Heinlein was in about 2008, with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which I donated to the office book swap after about 100 pages.

My current main interests in fiction are in classics (that is, up to about 1950); English only, unfortunately. In non-fiction, mainly physical science.

I don't read newspapers or keep up with the news in any way. I live in a country of which I am not a citizen so currently have no right to vote in any country. Keeping up with current affairs for me would be of no practical use and is bluntly just too horrifying.

>12 JulieLill: You're right. Mine was on the couch with another book partly on top of it. I just went and checked again and after having sat for a while with the whole cover exposed, the whole cover is now glowing.
Edited to get the cross-reference right. How ironic that I should do that--I trade in cross references in my day job.

... and on the back and spine too.

>8 JulieLill: >15 haydninvienna: Do I have to call the men in white to the two of you?

>16 Carol420: Not yet, I hope.

Still plugging on with the Faerie Queene. It's slowish going--I'm reading the Penguin Classics edition, which preserves the original spelling, and Spenser's syntax is that of verse, not prose. But the nine-line stanzas just keep jogging past. However, it's violent, in a cartoonish sort of way--the knights fight fiercely, get hurt, and then get up and do it all again (usually). Like Jerry dropping an anvil on Tom, Tom staggering around for a while with an anvil-shaped dent in him, and then recovering and going back to chasing Jerry. Of course it's an allegory, so was not intended to be realistic in the modern sense. It's more Spenser's depiction of a literal contest between personified vices and virtues, making sure that the virtues win. One does note that the virtuous ladies are fought over and are usually quite content to go with the victor.

All of which presents a serious question--why on earth should I read it? Why should anybody in the 21st century read it? Why read Tom Jones or (to push the boat as far out as possible) the Epic of Gilgamesh? (I have Gilgamesh among my tbr's, incidentally.) I saw a comment by scaifea (https://www.librarything.com/topic/296911#6609583), which presents the issue squarely. If I find the attitudes in a book from the past repugnant, why should I continue reading the book? I am well aware that the debate has been going on for centuries, so the best any of us can do is probably to find an answer that satisfies us.

One can say that the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there. But still, why should we be interested in how they do things there? Best answer I have so far is that all of these books are part of the Great Conversation and we will not understand the conversation if we hear only one side. I think this is some of what Italo Calvino is saying in this essay: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/.

I love and admire Calvino's mature writing and have most of it, but I suspect that his answers won't convince anybody who doesn't already see the classics as a Good Thing. I ask the literary scholars out there--why should I read the Faerie Queene or any other classic work? The fact that Calvino thought it worth while to write an essay about it in 1986 (or thereabouts) suggests that perhaps the question isn't entirely settled. In the meantime I'll just go back to the Queene.

I’m now in Zürich airport on the way to Montréal. As I said in another place, long flights are for reading (except overnight ones, which are for sleeping, if possible). I’ve brought the Queene and Mr Penumbra with me and also An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears, and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.
I have 5 hours layover, and knowing how good the transport is here I was going to nip into town and have a look at Yves Tinguely’s Heureka (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/heureka-useless-machine). But I had a run-in with the single most annoying thing Apple does—that is, move settings without telling you. For reasons I’m not going to explain, it matters to me which phone carrier I use when I’m out of Qatar. Therefore, I need to be able to find the carrier selection setting. It used to be easy to find right on the front page of settings. When we landed this morning I set the phone off flight mode and went for the carrier selection and it’s gone! I remembered that there was an iOS update recently and suspected that Apple had moved that setting. After a good deal of frenzied internet searching, I found it two layers down under Mobile Data. OK, I get that it’s more logical, but having to look for it in a hurry when I have other priorities is annoying. And the time it took to do all that means I’m not game to risk a run down to Seefeldquai.

>18 haydninvienna: I love that "useless" piece of artwork. I suppose you could use it to hang clothes on. Your phone situation sounds more than annoying. I wonder if people have rightly complained to Apple about their unwanted rearrangeing?

Well, I got to Montreal OK, and into our hotel, and found my wife there (she was coming separately from London). So it was simply a hiccup in an otherwise pretty good day. I don’t know whether anyone has complained to Apple, although they’re generally not great at responding to complaints. I stick with them for lots of other reasons.

I just went to a fine used bookstore in Montreal called The Word and there was a stack of stickers on the counter saying “I Didn’t Buy It on Amazon”. My sentiments exactly.

Like this:

.
ETA picture.

>19 Carol420: I tried to post a message last night about how that was 5he only real rough spot in an otherwise pretty good day. I went to a concert here last night and had trouble staying awake because it had been such a long day. After the fuss with the phone, everything else went according to plan, and the bit I was most worried about (my wife coming in separately from London and probably arriving while I was at the concert) also worked. So no more complaints from yours truly.

>22 haydninvienna: Glad things turned out well for you. That had to have been a lot of worries for one day.

>23 Carol420: Thanks. I may or may not have bought a book or two in The Word. I’m supposed to be at a conference on plain language but turns out that this afternoon is all for francophones so I had a free afternoon.

>21 haydninvienna: I get most of my books from the library but if I buy anything I get it from our local bookstore. The last book I bought from Amazon was one I couldn't find anywhere else.

>25 JulieLill: I don’t hate Amazon but I don’t want them to own everything. And it’s still not possible to browse in Amazon.

My conference is now all done. I called it a “plain language” conference but it’s really about clear communication. In my day job I draft rules, so this is of some importance to me. Weather in Montreal on our last day here is dismal, but hey. Friday was gorgeous but cold, so of course I’m stuck in the conference all day while my wife is swanning around in the sunshine visiting wineries and having a good time. Bah humbug!

>27 haydninvienna: My, my...that was fairly "plain language":)

>28 Carol420: no point in writing if people can’t understand it (with all due respect—which is not very much—to The Donald and other practitioners of nonsense). I most definitely write to be understood.
And on my last morning in Montreal I may have slogged a mile or so through the drizzle to another bookshop called Argo, where I may have bought Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White, and Schubert by John Reed. Neither of which I am likely to read in the immediate future. But as an Australian in Montreal I thought I should buy something by the only Australian ever to have won a Nobel Prize for literature.

>29 haydninvienna: I didn't know that. Good for you.

Gone a bit quiet in here, hasn't it? I slept rather than read on the flight back, but have now reconnected with the Queene. I found this gem (book V, canto V, stanza 25, spelling as in the Penguin text):

But vertuous women wisely vunderstand,
That they were borne to base humilitie,
Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie.

I wonder what Queen Elizabeth thought of that?

Still going on the Queene.
A digression. Prompted by a comment of Busifer's in another thread, I googled "only badly designed things need a manual". The result was slightly horrifying. But it turned up a copy of The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. I've been a fan of Don's for many years. In it I found this:

The reasons for the deficiencies in human-machine interaction are numerous. Some come from the limitations of today’s technology. Some come from self-imposed restrictions by the designers, often to hold down cost. But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction. Why this deficiency? Because much of the design is done by engineers who are experts in technology but limited in their understanding of people. “We are people ourselves,” they think, “so we understand people.” But in fact, we humans are amazingly complex. Those who have not studied human behavior often think it is pretty simple. Engineers, moreover, make the mistake of thinking that logical explanation is sufficient: “If only people would read the instructions,” they say, “everything would be all right.”

If you substitute "writers" for "engineers" in that passage, it becomes very salutary for people like me who write stuff that has to be understood. See above about where I spent the weekend before last.

Another 6-hour flight with a book. This time the book was Why Read the Classics?, by Italo Calvino. I grabbed it almost at random from a shelf in my house in England the night before I left. It starts with an essay that appeared in the New York Times, which I mentioned above (post 17). It’s a terrific collection and it gave me a good deal to think about, and possibly some more things to add to TBR.
I usually take my own music on airlines. This time it was pop and rock, not Bach. Springsteen’s live version of Dylan’s song “Chimes of Freedom”. Then the Byrds. For me, “Eight Miles High” is one of the greatest rock anthems of all time. (I have the Byrds’ version of “Chimes of Freedom” as well, but Springsteen’s one absolutely destroys it.)
Calvino has an essay on Candide. It's timely, this year when Bernstein’s operetta (or whatever it is) is all over the place. I saw a concert performance in Sweden (fabulous!) in February and am seeing another in London in a month. That one hopefully will be even more fabulous, with Sir Thomas Allen and Anne-Sofie von Otter, and Marin Alsop conducting.
The last paragraph of the essay on Candide is almost the best thing in Why Read the Classics? I’d like to quote it but it’s too long to type out. Sufficient to say that it’s a convincing explanation of the enigmatic advice that we must cultivate our garden. Worth seeking out a copy of Calvino’s book just for this essay.
And then go and get hold of a copy of Lenny’s own final version of Candide, with Jerry Hadley and June Anderson and god knows how many other great singers, and reduce yourself to tears with “And Make Our Garden Grow”, as I did.
(No going back to Springsteen after that. Instead Susan Graham’s luscious recording of mélodies by Reynaldo Hahn—swoon!)

Hey there. So I'm reading with interest your slog through the Faerie Queene and your ruminations about "why read the classics?" and I thought I'd chime in.

Given the political situation here in the US, I listened to a review and then bought the book (from my favorite local bookshop of course) Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt. He explains, via Shakespeare, how tyrants come to be. How the political situation is when they come to power, how the tyrant assumes power, how he wields it, etc. (no female tyrants are mentioned though Lady MacBeth does receive her just role as "enabler"). And I've been saying for the last few months, based in part on this book, that isn't it telling that the first written work in human history is, in fact, a book about a tyrant: Gilgamesh? I know you stay away from politics for very good reasons, and my apologies for bringing up these politically-charged books, but I thought it might help to continue the discourse on classics.

I would be interested to read Calvino's book because I would like to have more reasons for why it's necessary to read the classics. Why is it necessary/important for me to read (slog thru) Dickens? Because, as a native English speaker, he has some of the most brilliant prose in my native language. And because now I get the cultural references that had pretty much escaped me. I'm reading it with a F2F book group, otherwise I would probably never touch the works. His descriptions of poverty, too, are mind-numbing and still just as relevant then as they are now.

There's my 2p for the discussion, and thank you for being a reader on long flights!

>34 threadnsong: Hey there to you too. Taking your comments in no particular order--

I love Calvino, at least in his poet-fantast mode. I gabbled elsewhere about Invisible Cities, which is one of my all-time-favourite books. I think one of the definitions of a masterpiece is that it's a window into a different world, and Calvino's later books are certainly that. He has two stages to his literary life; in the earlier one he was a communist, and the books from then are "realistic". I have never read any of them and don't intend to. (None of them seem to be on LT.) But he switched tracks later in life and so we have Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and The Cloven Viscount. He and Jorge Luis Borges make a natural pair.

No worries about the politics. It's inescapable. Basically, I'm slacking somewhat on opposing the tyrants and "strong leaders" although I am a member of (and have given donations to) a UK political party that opposes Brexit (horrible word) and the Maybot and her crew. That's as much as I can do at the moment, I think.

As to "why should I read the classics", I'm going with the Great Conversation theory. I am an inheritor of Western high culture (or, as far as literature is concerned, that part of it written in English) and if I want to participate in that conversation I need to understand it. It's a commonplace that the understanding of the earlier parts of the conversation is breaking down--Shakespeare could have Hamlet describe his mother as following his father's coffin "like Niobe, all tears", and expect his audience to understand. Not so now. Any book in English written after the English Reformation up till about 1950 will have references in it to the English Bible and often to the Book of Common Prayer. I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, and I understand that cultural tradition. It's mine. I'm not claiming for it any superiority over anyone else's cultural tradition, it just happens to be mine. I'm comfortable in it. Why, seriously, do I need to "step out of my comfort zone"? I don't choose to sleep in an uncomfortable bed if I can help it either. There's material for a much longer essay there but I'm exposed enough already.

This is of course a separate issue from the one about whether I should read something to understand more about it. If it becomes necessary to understand about something unpleasant, I can cope with that. While I was living in Ireland I learned quite a bit about the unpleasant story of the Magdalene laundries because some new developments in it came about while I was there (the State agreeing to pick up the compensation tab and the religious order involved refusing to contribute). But this is essentially your point about Tyrant. It's all history. How did we come to be the way we are--in literature or music or politics or whatever? To understand how we are now, we may need to work out how we got here.

I'm not sure all that was entirely coherent, and I'd better do some real work anyway.

And just a bit more on Calvino: I just looked at the Work page for If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Of the top 12 LT recommendations, I own at least 6 (including 1 or 2 that are not yet entered on LT) and have read or at least tried to read all but one (Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme). Odd though that At Swim-Two-Birds showed up but The Third Policeman didn't. Evidently I like postmodern fiction but am not always comfortable with it.

On an embuggerance. I am sitting in one of the lounges in Doha Airport waiting for a flight to Cardiff. I’ve just realised that the copy of Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore referred to above is still in the cab I came here in. I had intended to finish the book on the flight.
I unfortunately I have a bit of a history of this sort of thing. Like the copy of The City of Dreaming Books that got left in Cairns Airport. There was one I left on a Lufthansa flight once. And the one I left on an Aer Lingus flight. That one was a library book too. I don’t ever seem to leave anything else behind (said he hopefully), just books.

>37 haydninvienna: It seems your books are world travelers and possibly may qualify for "frequent Flier" miles:) I certainly wouldn't mind being left on an Aer Lingus flight.

>38 Carol420: I seem to recall that Aer Lingus told me that unclaimed books left on flights get added to the staff library. I can’t argue too much with that.

November 23, written on Qatar Airways flight 321 to Cardiff, somewhere over the Black Sea. Having cleverly left Mr Penumbra in the cab, I read Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood instead. This was another of the books left unfinished on the coffee table.
Earthly Delights is the first of Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman mysteries (her series other than the Miss Fisher mysteries). Corinna is a former accountant who now runs a bakery. She and the other female inhabitants of her apartment building start receiving Biblically-worded death threats, and one morning she finds a young girl almost dead of a heroin overdose in the alley behind the bakery. So Corinna has two mysteries to solve. Who is killing Melbourne’s heroin addicts, and who is sending the threats? Of course it all works out. Corinna gets a new apprentice, helps send a blackmailer and a would-be murderer to prison, and finds a lover along the way. Oh, and there’s a bondage mistress and a witch. And some wonderful baked goods.

Earthly Delights is not great literature but it’s fun. There’s even a nice bit of creative revenge, in a small throwaway line about an offstage incident—the wife who got her own back on her wine bore husband by soaking the labels off a bunch of his expensive bottles. And I love Corinna’s proposed method of testing whether she is still alive (if it’s ever necessary)—pull a nice strong espresso shot somewhere nearby. I can relate to that. And Corinna’s friend the Professor reminds me of Doctor Opimian in Gryll Grange. (That’s a compliment.) And Kerry G is obviously a Pratchett fan. Can you tell that I like Kerry Greenwood’s mysteries?

I have to admit that this old, white, Protestant-raised male person loves Kerry Chapman’s heroines. Strong, independent women who have their sh*t together. I don’t rate the books I read, but I’d like to give Kerry Greenwood a few stars for getting Melbourne right. Love Melbourne. And I want to read more about Corinna Chapman.

And the music for this flight? Bach, starting with cantata BWV170, with Philippe Jaroussky and the Freibourg Baroque Orchestra. This is beyond beautiful. I seriously believe that the universe was created to make J S Bach possible.

Just posted by mejix: https://www.librarything.com/topic/162338#6637093. I’m stealing it.
ETA see above re clear writing.

Well, I had a pleasant afternoon yesterday wandering around Cardiff with my elder daughter and her boyfriend even though the weather was not great. Katherine has been a reader ever since she was small, and turns out the boyfriend is too. Cardiff has at least one good second-hand bookshop, called Troutmark Books. I bought:
Shakespeare’s Lives, which was a BB here a while ago
Other Men’s Flowers by (Field Marshal) A. P. Wavell
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T S Eliot
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.
A decent haul, all in good condition, for £16.
I made a point there of mentioning that Other Men’s Flowers was compiled (for those who don’t know it already, it’s an anthology of poetry) by a soldier. Wavell was commander of the British Army in North Africa in 1940 and 1941 but he got on the wrong side of Churchill and was moved to India as Viceroy (that is, the King’s representative). He used his leisure in India to compile this anthology, which was first published in 1944. I already have a copy in storage somewhere but had to buy this one—a reissue in paperback with an ISBN and everything.

Why does the “Complete Edition” of T S Eliot’s poetry not have Old Possum’s Book ... in it? Inquiring minds would like to know.

I found I had 2 copies of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and brought the second copy with me intending to give it to Katherine. Turns out she had already read it and so has Eddie (the boyfriend). Both loved it.

Flight back to Doha. (Yes, flew to Cardiff from Doha on Friday and back again on Saturday. Three thousand miles and six hours, plus hanging-around time, each way. I do this at least once a month.) I started reading Shakespeare's Lives, and did not leave it in the taxi! What a fascinating book, about "bardolatry" and the strange things it leads people to do. A lot in there about the forgery of documents about Shakespeare's life.

>43 haydninvienna: I enjoyed that book-but haven't gotten around to the sequel!

>45 JulieLill: I know there are a couple more books by Becky Chambers and I will probably read them eventually.

Still going on Shakespeare's Lives. A small issue which I feel a bit amateurish mentioning here where there are so many professional editors, but I've noticed a surprising number of minor proofreader's errors in it. The latest one is "unintimated" where the context suggests that "unintimidated" was meant. In another place he refers to a society's "Honorable Secretary". I've not heard of such an officer. I have heard of a society having an Honorary Secretary, often abbreviated "Hon. Sec.". The latter might be right, of course, but it looks odd all the same.

ETA: Finished Shakespeare's Lives, and still being piqued by the editing errors. This is the Clarendon Press, after all, and Professor Schoenbaum gets off the odd stab at other scholars' errors in transcription, and even once notes that another writer's book was inadequately proof-read. Still a fascinating read.

I said this was "ramblings". I'm a geek and proud of it. But this fellow is a geek's geek: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tadashi-tokieda-collects-math-and-physics-surpris....

I read Quanta magazine on line most mornings.

Back with the Queene. It’s too bulky to take on a flight. But silly me. I’ve been reading the fat Penguin Classics pb when I have, on the shelf unopened, a really nice hb Clarendon Press edition in 2 volumes. Nicer to hold, nicer to read, just better in every way, so now reading that one.

I finished it! Almost a thousand pages, 4 nine-line stanzas to a page, of late 16th-century English verse. What do I do now? Probably read it again, but not straight away.

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Very quick read indeed! Thank dog though that “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” is never likely to be turned into a musical.

Back to serious. Rupert Hart-Davis: Man of Letters by Philp Ziegler. I’m going to have to think a bit about this, but one quotation leapt out at me:

... he rapidly reached the conclusion that reading was neither a pastime nor a duty but a necessity of life; one read, as one breathed or ate, because otherwise existence would become impossible.

>51 haydninvienna: Sounds like a smart man and most of us would share his theory.

>52 Carol420: A fascinating man. The quotation is describing him in his childhood. He started buying books as a child and never stopped, and apparently had the good fortune never to lose any. The University of Tulsa bought his library, and according to the library website the collection has over 16,000 items. Not all of those would be books, but still ...! A publisher most of his working life (except for a brief and inglorious attempt at being an actor, and war service between 1940 and 1945), he was also literary executor for a number of authors, of whom probably the most famous was Siegfried Sassoon.

He was definitely an old-school publisher, much more interested in literary quality than in making money, and would turn down a book that would sell well and be profitable but which he didn't think was good enough, but publish a loser that he approved of. Even potentially profitable books often ended up losing money because of his perfectionism.

So I’m back in Bicester and I find that the indie bookshop has moved into fine new, larger premises (piquantly, right next to a W H Smith). Anyone passing through Bicester, I encourage you to have a look at Cole’s Bookshop. While I was there, the following new friends sauntered up and introduced themselves:
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Spitfire: A Very British Love Story by John Nichol
The River in the Sky by Clive James
A Christmas Carol and Other Stories by Charles Dickens.
No pleading puppy eyes here—they just said Hi, do you want to be best buds? So I had to say yes. And I ordered another book by Martin Rees, On the Future: The Prospects for Humanity.

I may possibly not read the former First Lady’s book, but I wanted it anyway. This is a political statement, not a literary one. I have every reason to think the book is good.

And a quick visit to the British Heart Foundation charity shop produced a nice Modern Library of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and a fairly old and rather daggy The Trial by Franz Kafka.

This is definitely a ramble. While I was poking around in the books in Bicester, I found a copy of Heinrich Heine’s Book of Songs that may be unique as far as LT is concerned. There are lots of translations of the book on LT, of course, but this one is unusual because the translation is by Sir Robert Garran, who was a significant figure in Australian history. Interesting man, worth looking up in Wikipedia if you’ve not heard of him. Also, the book was printed by the Government Printer of the day.

And finally, on Saturday afternoon my wife and I were at the Barbican Centre in London for a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “operetta” Candide. (The quotation marks are because it’s most certainly not like most works called “operetta”.) The shop yielded a copy of The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Not a bad haul for a weekend.

Fab performance of Candide BTW. Sir Thomas Allen as Dr Pangloss and Ann-Sofie von Otter as the Old Lady display an unexpected talent for stage business. Wonderful singing all round, the London Symphony Orchestra on top form and Marin Allsop taking part in the stage fun.

Finished reading Stranger to the Ground by Richard Bach last night. This was another book I picked off the shelf in Bicester. It was Bach's first book, long before Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I first read it many years ago, and I'm pleased to find that the Suck Fairy hasn't bestowed her baneful attentions on it. I was reminded of it by hfglen's reference here to Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker (which I also have, and think is wonderful).

Just started Pickwick Papers, which I've never read before. I didn't know what I expected--the impression often given is that it's a laugh riot. It's not (so far). In the first hundred pages we get the episode of Jingle and the spinster, and then the madman's manuscript. Nothing seems to turn on the manuscript, so far anyway. I wonder if Dickens was just making it up as he went along, trying to get as much in that would please the subscribers, with no better idea than anyone else how it would all turn out. Odd how much the first hundred pages reminded me of Thomas Love Peacock, in that there's the same mockery of Lord Brougham's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Some of the same tropes, like the group of friends on a journey. Even the tone is similar, although Peacock is a better writer in some ways (less given to pompous circumlocution for comic effect, for example, and Peacock seems to have had a clear idea of what was to happen). But it soon becomes obvious that Dickens could do things that Peacock couldn't. Peacock could never have created Sam Weller, for example. Whoever said that the book is pretty ordinary until Sam Weller appears was right.

I'm just now at the point where they are going to the Eatanswill election, which is where things supposedly get good.

Finished Pickwick Papers, and enjoyed it more than I expected. It made me laugh aloud at least once, of which more in a moment. I think now I can contemplate reading some of his later, more serious novels, and I have A Christmas Carol all cued up ready.

Dickens obviously disliked (most) lawyers and the justice system of the day, apparently with reason. The point where I laughed is the moment during the trial of Bardell v Pickwick when Sam Weller gives evidence that Mrs Bardell and her friends had spoken of the generosity of Dodson & Fogg (Mrs Bardell's attorneys) in having taken up the case "on spec, and to charge nothin' at all for costs, unless they got 'em out of Mr Pickwick". I would have liked for the notes to explain why "Dodson and Fogg turned very red", and why Serjeant Buzfuz abruptly discharged Sam from the witness box, but that's just me. Sam was giving evidence of what another person had said. What Sam said was hearsay about (and so not admissible as evidence of) what Dodson and Fogg had done, but the point was that at that time, taking on the conduct of an action for a plaintiff on the basis that no costs would be charged unless the plaintiff succeeded was professionally improper and (I think) constituted both a civil wrong and a crime, called champerty. Serjeant Buzfuz stopped his examination of Sam for that reason, in case Sam said a bit too much. Dickens had been a court reporter, and had obviously been a spectator at a good many trials.

One minor editing oddity I noticed in the Penguin edition, which is supposed to be based on the first published complete edition of the book, is that the title of the two senior counsel, "Serjeant", is so spelt up to the end of chapter 30, but after that becomes "Sergeant". There is nothing I can see in the Note on the Text to explain this. The Project Gutenberg text has "Serjeant" throughout. That spelling is correct, at least in terms of the usage of the time. The Serjeants were an order of advocates who at one time had the exclusive right to practice in the Court of Common Pleas, where Bardell v Pickwick was brought. Over time, after Sir Francis Bacon was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1600 or thereabouts, most senior advocates were appointed as Queen's or King's Counsel rather than Serjeants, and the order of Serjeants gradually died out.

And off the chain in London today. Visited Foyles, and bought:
The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, which I may or may not read, as with Michelle Obama’s memoir.
And a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which isn’t within reach and I’m too lazy to go upstairs and get it
And then to Waterstones in Piccadilly to get a copy of Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop to replace the one I left in a cab a couple of weeks ago.

In Waterstones I was involved in a somewhat unusual conversation. After finding my book I went to the counter with it, and there was a woman there in deep conversation with a member of the staff. I gathered that the staff member had recommended Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and she thought it was terrific. He had apparently then recommended Towles’ second one and she had thought that was pretty good too, but couldn’t remember the title, so I chipped in and said ”Rules of Civility”. They looked at me in surprise and I pointed to it on the nearby shelf. Anyway, Waterstones Guy had another recommendation so they said would I mind waiting a minute (of course not) so they went over to the shelves and came back with another book. The woman then said to me “You go next and then I’ll follow on”. So I passed Mr Penumbra across and the Waterstones Guy said how good it was too. I explained how I was replacing the other copy and then said how nice it was to find someone working in Waterstones who was actually interested in and knowledgeable about what he was selling, and he said “Oh, yes! It’s the best job in the world!” And apparently meant it.

So of course I produced my phone and showed them the LibraryThing page. Waterstones Guy made a note of the URL.

>60 haydninvienna: Quiet a haul you made there. You must be a book sellers dream come true.

>61 Carol420: well, I seem to be keeping Cole’s in Bicester in business all by myself.

>62 haydninvienna: I loved A Gentleman in Moscow, one of my favourite books this year. I also read Rules of Civility after it, whilst it was a good book I didn’t think it was in the same league as A Gentleman in Moscow.

>63 Andrew-theQM: I’m considering adding both to my TBR, which is plenty long enough as it is.

And a happy December solstice and Yule to all.

Way back in post #5 I promised some more pics of my wife's pets.

Here's another of Mo:



and Kenny:



and Livvy:



Mo you already know about (see post #5). Kenny is a rescue--he was apparently living with a traveller or gipsy group and got rather neglected and was picked up by one of the horse rescue charities. He's a fat little 13h palomino gelding. Really a pretty boy.

Livvy (formally Olivia) was bred for my wife as a dressage horse (my wife owned her dam in Australia for many years). 16 h grey warmblood mare. Livvy was somewhat successful in advanced dressage competition in England but is now being brought up as a jumper.

Edited to correct misspelling.

>65 haydninvienna: What beautiful babies. I just don't understand people that mistreat children and any animal. I worked in a zoo for 28 years and we were always getting calls from people that had thought that it was a grand idea to get some wild animal as a pet. They soon discovered that it wasn't a cat or a dog...or even a horse nd could care less who were were or if you came home...so lets call the zoo and give it to them. One of our number 1 conservation messages became "wild animals are NOT pets" and "if you have a animal that IS a pet for heaven sake please, please take care of it".

> 66 Absolutely agree. My wife has looked after at least 2 other horses that were rescued by horse charities. Kittens and puppies aren’t the only animals that aren’t just for Christmas.

Incidentally, sorry about the rugs. It’s rather wet and muddy in southern England just now.

> 66 Apropos of that, we have “Monkey World” (a TV show about the primate sanctuary in Dorset) on the box, and they’re talking about a marmoset running loose in London. Probably an escaped pet.

Anyhow, it’s mid-afternoon on a surprisingly pleasant although chilly Christmas Eve in southern England and I’m sat in our conservatory with a shot of rye and a book. Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, and have a fabulous day if you don’t.

>70 haydninvienna: Merry Christmas. Have wonderful day.

Having had a lovely Christmas lunch with my wife, I went to visit my daughters Katherine and Laura and Katherine’s boyfriend Eddie for drinks and laughter. I’ve acquired:
Forgotten Science by S D Tucker
A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf
The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus by Harry Harrison.
My daughters know me well.

On Thursday morning the postman brought:
A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
and
Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.

Then my wife and I went into Bicester to do a few errands and went into a cafe for lunch. The place was very busy and we would have a significant wait for our food. She had brought a book, I hadn’t. (I had left mine at home: too much risk of leaving it somewhere.) So I went across the street to The Works, which was having a sale, and picked up the following for £1 each:
Her Royal Spyness and A Royal Pain by Rhys Bowen
In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear
A Letter of Mary and Garment of Shadows by Laurie R King
Date with the Executioner by Edward Marston.

The Works isn’t exactly literary, but I’ve seen all six books praised on LT, and at that price I don’t mind taking the small risk. I’ve already finished Her Royal Spyness and started A Royal Pain.

I had another small haul from the British Heart Foundation shop this morning. I dropped off a bag of donated books but bought a copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (Penguin Modern Classics ed), and one of the weirdest books I’ve ever bought, which I bought only because it’s so weird. It is The Periodic Table of Poems by one Peter Davern, who is apparently a chemistry lecturer at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The book is a series of 92 short verses describing the 92 traditional chemical elements plus one more for the transuranium elements, and giving a page or so of description with each verse. As to the quality of the verses, let’s say that Mr Davern is at no risk of becoming Poet Laureate.

The copy I bought has an inscription in it from “Peter” (presumably the author) to someone named Mark. The inscription is dated in May 2018. Short trip from presentation to charity shop!

>70 haydninvienna: Thank you for the lovely Solstice/Christmas wishes, and I wish you and yours a happy (belated) St. Stephen's Day! I am catching up with all of my LT friends and have enjoyed reading your November/December escapades with books and bookstores.

And >59 haydninvienna: My f2f Dickens group started with the The Pickwick Papers and I joined them at The Old Curiosity Shop. One of the grand things that I like about the modern era and old(er) women my age is the view that Dickens' women are almost enough to throw the book at the wall, except that you may damage it (the wall? the book?).

Since reading Dickens, though, I have learned the cultural references to him, the historical view of the Victorian era, and agree with your view on his dislike of lawyers especially after reading Bleak House. I had to go onto that wonderful site of arcane knowledge, Wikipedia, in order to understand the extra character in that book called "The Chancery Court." Completely out of my realm of experience. It came to mind that Dickens, like Tolkien, invited a non-living extra character into his work that permeates its entirety: Dickens with the Chancery Court, Tolkien with The Ring.

Glad to hear your daughter's boyfriend also enjoys books and best wishes to you and your family for 2019. Many safe journeys to you, and may your books on planes always find their way back into your reading hands.

*Note: Touchstones are not working well right now . . .

>73 threadnsong: I’d not thought of the Court of Chancery as a “non-living character”, but that’s a good way to put it. To my mind Bleak House has another non-living character-the fog. In Dickens’ day, fog was an unavoidable part of a London winter, and that continued to be the case until the 1950s.

A supposedly true story about the Court of Chancery: in (roughly) the Regency era, the head of the Court was the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon. He was regarded as an almost infallible judge but he had an appalling reputation for delay. He is supposed to have begun delivering judgment on an estate case once by saying something like “I have had this case by me for twenty years; and as the estate funds are all expended, and all the parties are dead, I thought it was time to give judgment”. Don’t quote me on it for heaven’s sake. I think I read it in Miscellany at Law, a collection of legal anecdotes, and I last read that book far too many years ago to be sure. Piquantly, the editor of Miscellany at Law, R E Megarry, later became a judge himself, in the modern successor to the Court of Chancery.

I’ve not so far ever recovered a book left on an aeroplane, unfortunately.

And a happy New Year and lots of great reading to you and yours!

>74 haydninvienna: - Oh yes, that's right, the fog! Yes, that would definitely be another "non-living character" in this bleak book. And while I certainly wouldn't fact check your recollection of Lord Eldon, Dickens does give similar stories about the survivors of estates in Bleak House so your recollection is probably not too far off. One of the characters is a single father with two young children whose wife has died, and he is not too far from it by the time we meet him, all waiting on the settlement of his father's? grandfather's? estate held up in Chancery Court.

Speaking of fog, in one of the historical fiction/science fiction books on my shelf, Madman's Dance, the author used a particularly horrendous London fog occurrence during the time of Jack the Ripper. The action in that book takes place during his reign of terror. She also used historically accurate maps of Whitechapel to help with the authenticity of her storytelling.

Thank you for the New Years wishes as well!

My husband has an ongoing case in his homeland in Africa,six years in January,and the delays are never ending.He is the most unliterary of men,hasnt read a novel since he was 16,but he can be heard muttering at yet another complication or mishap in the proceedings ''Jarndyce v Jarndyce'' OK,its only(!) 6 years instead of over 4 decades in Bleak House,but give it time and we may surpass it!lol
He also likes to quote Shakespeare's Richard II,''First kill all the lawyers''
But all other comments are unprintable or libellous and most unliterary! ;0)

>76 dustydigger: I'm not a big fan of lawyers as a class, although I'm one myself. I had some professional contact with a few English judges while I was working in London a few years ago, and found them generally to be quite unlike the judicial stereotype of remote and mandarin-like. "Case management" is always a major issue for them. I also remember one judge being against some policy proposal that he thought would be impracticable for some people because of, as he said, the inordinate cost of litigation in English courts.

Anyway, after all my fun and games over the previous couple of days I am definitely not staying up to see 2019 in. So Happy New Year, everybody, and if you are celebrating please have fun and be safe.

A very Happy and Prosperous New Year to Everyone!

>78 haydninvienna: And best of wishes to you and yours! Stayed up with the telly and thought how nice it was to be inside, warm and dry, with no crowds and a nice glass of cider to hand.

>80 threadnsong: or anyone trying to kill you!

>81 Carol420: You gave me a start there! Then I realised you were referring to >76 dustydigger: 's quotation from Richard II.

>82 haydninvienna: Sorry. Hope your heart has slowed back to normal:)

First 2 reads of 2019.

On 1 January, finished A Spirit of Play by David Malouf, which I had picked up late last year and not continued, can't remember why, but I finished it now. Technically a re-read because I first read it not long after it was published. It's his Boyer lectures (https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer_Lectures) from 1998 about what makes Australia different. I kind of identify with Malouf because he is from the same city as I am, and I recognise a lot of his description of Brisbane back when it was a nice big country town. The essays are still a beautiful evocation of the old Australia that was provincial in the same way as Edinburgh or the Dublin of the 1820s was provincial, and of what still makes Australia a pretty good place to be. One of the trillions of things I would like to do with what remains of my life is to write as well as Malouf does.

Next was Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans by Luis Fernando Verissimo. This book exists somewhere at the intersection of Jorge Luis Borges (who actually appears in it), Italo Calvino, Poe, Lovecraft and Conan Doyle. A murder mystery with warring scholars, academic egos, Dr John Dee, the Kabbalah, the Necronomicon, a secret society that may not exist, a conference secretary who may have been an angel, and an extremely unreliable narrator? I still don't really know what happened except that the right victim ended up dead. What on earth can I say about it other than that I loved it?

A surprise. I swung past our office bookswap today and among the thrillers (somebody here likes Dick Francis), miscellaneous finance stuff and Arabic books I saw a copy of The Man Who Loved Children, which was a recent group read here. Having skimmed that thread, I did not find the book appealing, but I did pick up Adam & Eve by Sena Jeter Naslund (I know nothing about either the book or the author, but it seemed worth a shot given the price--free) and The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in the Persephone Books edition. Few reviews of either on LT and what reviews there are are all over the place. There is a 2-star review of the latter that includes the sentence "Save your money and buy a box of Milk Tray, eat all the chocolates you like the best and then, in one sitting, finish up all the rest of the them. Same effect.", but other reviewers are kinder. Someone compared the former to "a pretentious Da Vinci Code" but still gave it 3 stars. I doubt that I'll read either one straight away, but you never know.

ET fix dangling participle!

I've been reading 2 of the Mary Russell books, A Letter of Mary and Garment of Shadows, and quite enjoying them. I like the concept although I'm not a big fan of "continuations by other hands". I got turned off this concept permanently by Eoin Colfer's continuation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the various attempts to mimic P G Wodehouse. As Mark Twain is supposed to have said to his wife when she attempted to cure him of swearing, they have the words but not the tune.

However, Mary Russell is not a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes stories by another hand--it's an independent series which should be judged on its own terms, even though it shares characters. Or has some characters with the same names and some recognisable characteristics--or something like that. Anyway, they seem to me to be good mysteries and to have more depth to them than Conan Doyle's original stories. Not being a big reader of mysteries in general, I may or may not look for the rest of the series, but won't turn down any that come my way.

Minor points: would Mary Russell actually have said "go pack" in 1925, rather than "go and pack"? Of course Mary was actually American, so possibly. But surely Paddington Station wouldn't have been called a "train station". Given that the text is supposed to have been written by Mary contemporaneously with the events described, I'm pretty sure both of these are anachronisms. But I really don't care too much, and am certainly not going to be writing angry letters to Laurie R King. Apart from anything else, I might be wrong ...

I read Her Royal Spyness, another one of the Works haul, and found it OK. Another series I'd probably read more of if it came my way.

Also reading, or trying to read, The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus. More about this on the Green Dragon.

As noted in other threads, I was in Dublin this weekend. Advised by master-enabler pgmcc, I bought:
From Chapters in Parnell Street:

The Orchid Trilogy by Jocelyn Brooke
Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlew Creek (both by David Malouf)
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver
Breakfast with Anglo by Simon Kelly.

I bought the Brooke because I read it many years ago and was reminded of it by someone reviewing another book by Brooke, The Image of a Drawn Sword, which I looked for but didn't find. Dark Matter was a BB from someone on LT, partly because I'm interested in Svalbard, which is its setting. Breakfast with Anglo is about the collapse of the Irish property boom and consequently the Irish banking system in 2008. I have a personal interest because I was working on certain aspects of the "support" given to the banks after the collapse. I don't expect to learn anything new, but for €3, why not?

From Books Upstairs, which runs a bit more to the quirky and unusual:

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (another BB)
The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser
The Law-Making Process by Michael Zander.

I'm reading The Rituals of Dinner at the moment--it's fascinating.

Then from the mothership, Hodges Figgis on Dawson Street, which claims to be the oldest bookshop in Europe:

The Plague by Albert Camus
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald.

I've been wanting to try Sebald for a while. The Moonstone because I'd been reading The Woman in White on the flight out, and if you skip judiciously it's great. And The Plague because Camus.

>87 haydninvienna: You went to the (supposed) oldest bookshop in Europe??? I am so jealous on this side of the pond! Having not read Moonstone but having read The Woman in White, I was pleased with the latter and saw some recent BBC mini-series episodes of it. I thought it was quite well done. The ending is great.

And yes, Camus. I prefer him to Sartre. Camus' world has a little more . . . human connection to it. Will have to re-read Les Justes one of these days, especially since it's such a short play.

>88 threadnsong: Only “supposed”, it seems. Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is a good bit older (1732 against 1768 for HF). Still a decent age, and HF is still a great bookshop.

As I said in #87, I was reading The Woman in White on the flight to Dublin. I actually started some weeks ago, but got stuck about 200 pages in and almost Pearl-ruled it at that. I picked it up again for the flight thinking I should try to finish it, but instead started to write about why I didn't like it. Then I started reading again--it was the only book I had with me--after skipping another hundred pages or so, and my view of the book changed significantly. I finished the rest of it before the flight landed in Dublin. This is not a review, but some thoughts on my response to the book.

My initial feeling was that it was a straightforward piece of Victorian melodrama, that the characters were all cardboard cut-outs (with one exception), and that it was written around the theme of the complete lack of property rights for married women (up till 1882 anyway). Only the third proposition was true, I found. Sarah Waters is quoted on the back of my Vintage copy to the effect that it had one of the best plots in English fiction. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_White_(novel)) gives a full summary of the plot (note: there be spoilers).

The "good" characters (again, with one exception) might start as cutouts, but by the end even Laura, the beautiful, kind but gormless heroine, is showing signs of developing a personality. Walter Hartright (great name--named by Captain Obvious, maybe?) turns out to be both brave and clever as well as good-hearted. Only the villains remain more or less cardboard. The exception is Marian Halcombe, Laura's half-sister. Marian is smart and tough right from the beginning and is devoted to Laura. Unfortunately she is, as Walter thinks on first meeting her, ugly (although Walter's description of her doesn't seem particularly unattractive to me). Ugly or not, she and Walter become good friends and join in looking out for the beautiful (and potentially wealthy) but useless Laura. Marian really is a great fictional character, one I'd love to meet. None of the characters is particularly complex, but they're real enough for the story. The novel is after all a story, not a character study.

One of the reasons I almost Pearl-ruled the book was that I was so impatient with Walter for preferring the beautiful but useless Laura to the less attractive but smart and tough Marian. I think in the end I forgave him for that, more or less, and the three of them end up as a household anyway. In any case, if Walter had fallen for Marian the plot wouldn't have worked.

Bottom line: I think I'm going to go back and read it properly. I think that in some ways Wilkie Collins was a better writer than his friend and occasional co-author Charles Dickens. There is less tugging at the reader's heart-strings. But Dickens could do one thing at least that Collins couldn't--that is, create mythical characters. David Copperfield, say, is just as much cardboard as Walter Hartright, but David Copperfield becomes part of our mental furniture in a way that Walter Hartright doesn't. Even Marian Halcombe, good though she is, is not mythical in the same way. In a sense, she is actually too good because too like a real person.

It did give me some reason to think about "show don't tell" though. There's a lot of "telling" about the characters at the beginning, but by the end we have seen the characters in action, and the telling has been pretty thoroughly justified. This led me to reflect on something I have wondered about for a while in a book which I otherwise like very much, To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. At a critical point in the action, the "butler"* Baine says to Tossie Mering something like "You have a good heart, and great abilities but choose not to use them". The problem is that I can recall nothing in the text to justify any of it. We are never shown Tossie as anything other than a vain, self-centred, extremely spoilt and not-over-bright 20-something woman. Maybe Baine had private sources of information, or maybe he was just overcome by emotion (although Baine appears to be far too clever to have been simply overcome by lust, and Tossie's fiance Terence, who is none too bright himself, works out pretty quickly how empty she is). Once again though, if Baine had thought differently of Tossie, the plot wouldn't have worked. Hmm--compare Baine's and Terence's responses to Tossie. Baine appears to be much smarter than Terence, but Terence, although at first infatuated with Tossie, realises quickly that she is not the woman for him. Baine, the clever one, marries her, which has major consequences. Maybe Baine is so much more acute than Terence that he can see qualities in Tossie that are hidden from every other character than Tossie's parents? Maybe Baine was right, given what happened after that marriage--but if that's the case, Connie Willis isn't really playing fair.

* If you've read the book, you can probably guess the reason for the quotes.

Pets again. This is Livvy (see #65) in action at Cherwell Competition Centre near home:



Don't know yet whether she actually did any good (it was her first outing as a jumper).

Update: didn’t win anything and needs a lot of training but behaved herself. This is one of the jumps she took properly; others weren’t so successful. But she was a good girl and will get some more training.

>92 haydninvienna: She's a beauty. She's obviously won the most important prize...your heart!

>93 Carol420: Not so much mine as my wife’s. She is the horse lover in the family. But I think they’re decorative and sometimes beautiful. That picture was a particularly good one.

And yes, I’m still reading, even if rather spasmodically. My latest was Service with a Smile, by P G Wodehouse. This was a somewhat odd experience. I was maybe 20 pages in when I started to feel that the style wasn’t right. The Old Master was sounding like a bad parody of himself, all “polysyllabic humour” instead of the usual wit and sparkle. A bit further on and I got the distinct feeling that he was writing just to get it done: the plot was recycled from the earliest Blandings and Uncle Fred books. A quick look at the copyright date showed that it had been written in 1962, by which time Plum was clearly doing it by numbers. Sad. At moments there were flashes of the Plum of old, but the spirit wasn’t really there.

>95 haydninvienna: I hate when that happens to characters that I have come to trust to be interesting and to behave in the manner in which I am accustomed. It's almost losing your trusted friend.

>96 Carol420: I fixed the problem by getting out The Code of the Woosters, and settling down to read it for the umpteenth time. I think it has a claim to be the best of the Wooster and Jeeves novels, and the magic is definitely there.

>90 haydninvienna: I'm glad you changed your opinion of Woman in White and I really liked your thoughts about it. I read it while still getting used to the master, Dickens, and I think Collins sticks less with a great number of characters and instead concentrates on plot. I've seen Dickens have many of his characters as caricatures of people, and I saw hints of his looking in-depth at people by David Copperfield. I've also heard that "Woman" is the first English detective novel, though the earlier serial publication of Bleak House could present an earlier detective character.

As a result of my small accident on my trip back to England over the weekend, I'm having a couple of DNBR days (for details see here). This morning my book was Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. I suppose I ought to be disappointed with this because I bought it partly in the hope of finding a way to sort out some of the crazy sentences I encounter in my work, but Ms Florey firmly disclaims any suggestion that her book would do that. But it's fun all the same. I thought it was almost worth while just for the quotation from Virginia Woolf in a side note on page 141 "Style is a very simple matter: all rhythm". Absolutely agree.

As to crazy sentences: as noted in my introduction, I write rules for a living. Once we were asked to do some work on a document that contained this gem:

The provisions of a Netting Agreement which provide for the determination of, or for payment of or in respect of, the net balance of the close-out values, termination values, market values, liquidation values, replacement values or other relevant values (including the value of any damages which may arise from a party's failure to enter into a transaction required to be entered into under or pursuant to such provisions of the Netting Agreement) calculated in respect of accelerated and/or terminated payment or delivery obligations or entitlements, or accelerated and/or terminated obligations or entitlements relating to the making of payments or deliveries, in either case under one or more Qualified Financial Instruments entered into thereunder or to which such Netting Agreement applies (including a payment or delivery in respect of a contract or transaction required to be entered into under or pursuant to such provisions) will not be affected by any applicable insolvency laws limiting the exercise of rights to set off, offset or net out obligations, payment amounts or any such values between an Insolvent Party and another party.

Given up yet? If it helps, the subject of that dreadful sentence is "provisions" in the first line, and the verb for that subject is "will not be affected", 141 words later.

>100 haydninvienna: OMG! I don't think I have ever seen...or want to see again...a sentence with that many words! Does anyone actually read all that? Okay...I did, so guess that answers my question:) You should just write book reviews. You'd have a lot more fun.

>101 Carol420: Nah. Making sense of that sort of gobbledygook is half the fun. I rewrote it, and ended up with about 5 or 6 separate sentences. I can’t quote them for you, unfortunately—since the client didn’t use them they have never seen the light of day.

That sentence I quoted is out of a consultation document that the client did publish, and it’s almost word for word from a “model law” about certain financial instruments published by a trade association and proposed to be adopted by any country whose financial markets want to trade in those instruments.

I emailed Kitty Burns Florey saying how much I liked Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog and asking for the source of the quotation from Virginia Woolf. It's from one of her letters to Vita Sackville-West, and Ms Florey assures me that the rest of the letter is "interesting ...". Knowing as much as I do about their relationship (that is, as much as is set out in the Wikipedia articles), I can imagine it might be.

>100 haydninvienna: vis a vis The Faerie Queene. Which one were you saying you had challenges in understanding? Or debating the merits of, including, but not limited to, the amount of dialogue, discussion, description . . . oh wait, I see where the writing of many words can be an end in and of itself.

My hat is off to you, sir, for wishing to continue to read under any and all circumstances, including but not limited to, airplanes, airline waiting rooms, hotels, transcontinental journeys . . .

>104 threadnsong: In the end, I didn't have too much trouble with the FQ as long as I took it slowly. The syntax is difficult and there is the occasional unusual word (one common one: "wone"--it simply means "live/reside", as with "wohnen" in German), and one has to be aware that some words that look familiar have changed their meanings. But the sentence I quoted in #100 was another bottle of hay entirely. (You can read the whole document here, if you're a serious glutton for punishment. The website is maintained by Thomson Reuters so is as safe as anything on the net ever is.) My problem with reading the Penguin version was that it was simply awkward to hold, and the 2-volume Oxford one was much easier, but neither text was in modernised language.

And now here's a kind of self-inflicted BB. I was looking at this thread and thought to add Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, which I read some years ago but do not own. I remembered it while wandering around Cardiff as mentioned in >42 haydninvienna:, because the boyfriend is a mathematician (he is finishing up a PhD in mathematical modelling). After adding it to my "five books", I thought I'd go on Amazon and buy a copy because I remember it being pretty good although rather sad. (Goldbach's Conjecture is the statement that "every even number can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers". Simply as it can be stated, it has not been proved after more than 200 years.) In the book, Uncle Petros becomes obsessed with the idea of proving it, and the quest basically takes over his life.

When I went on the Amazon website, I found that Apostolos Doxiadis has another book called Logicomix, which is "a graphic novel about the foundational quest in mathematics", according to Wikipedia. This is about, among other things, Gottlob Frege's attempt to place all of mathematics on a firm logical foundation, and Bertrand Russell's discovery of a logical flaw in it. So I ordered both. Logicomix is the first graphic novel I have bought.

Lest this post give a misleading impression, I'm not a mathematician by any means. I can't do any of this stuff, but the ideas fascinate me.

Cake day at the Regulatory Authority!

After Qatar won the 2019 Asian Cup, the office threw the second celebration in two working days--the first was last Thursday after Qatar beat the UAE in the semis. Four-nil on the UAE's home turf! Very satisfactory under current circumstances. The Qataris seem to regard beating the UAE as being better than winning the trophy. I'll see if I can upload a decent picture from the cake day, one that shows the diversity in this workplace. We have people here from at least 20 nationalities--apart from Qatari, I can think of Australian, British, French, Irish, Finnish, South African, Kenyan, Sri Lankan, Indian, Pakistani, Lebanese, American, Filipino, Italian, Moroccan--the CEO is American but the chief operating officer is Qatari. And we all rub along pretty well.

The things I do. As I mentioned, I write rules for a financial regulator. I have recently drafted a set of rules about customer and investor protection. You may (but probably don't) know that in Australia, there has been a Royal Commission (a very formal public inquiry, with powers to subpoena witnesses and so on) into misconduct in the financial sector. The Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Hayne, is a retired Judge of the High Court of Australia. He gave his final report a few days ago. The report is directly relevant to what I am doing, and one of our board members is a former chairman of the Australian financial regulator and will certainly read the report closely. I am properly paid for the rude remarks about judges' writing that I made in my other thread. Here is Commissioner Hayne:

Rewarding misconduct is wrong. Yet incentive, bonus and commission schemes throughout the financial services industry have measured sales and profit, but not compliance with the law and proper standards. Incentives have been offered, and rewards have been paid, regardless of whether the sale was made, or profit derived, in accordance with law. Rewards have been paid regardless of whether the person rewarded should have done what they did.

It's about as different as could be imagined from the word salad quoted in >100 haydninvienna:.

I’ve been a bit quiet for a while, what with RL getting in the way, and in particular with wife and stepdaughter visiting. Both are now back home and I’m trying to break a brief reading funk with Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce. I vaguely reading one of this series a few years ago.
There are several books in the series. I’m not sure how to describe them. Since the world that they are set in is that of now but not here, I suppose they are fantasy, but in the form of a parody of a noir private eye novel. I’m not yet sure whether I get the joke or not.

ETA: I must admit he has a turn of phrase. I was much taken with this:

It’s as if some master perfumer and necromancer had foreseen all the broken promises of your life to come, all the pangs of unrequited love and unreturned letters; the torment of watching a phone that never rings; the bright expectancy of fresh hope at breakfast, in ruins by sunset ... it was as if he took all these things and blended them into a single fragrance and called it whatever the French is for disappointment — Désolé or Chagrin or something.

.
He is describing the smell of hot dogs cooking as compared to their taste.

>109 haydninvienna: Who would have ever guessed. I was really being caught up in his description until I found out it was about hot dogs:) Just think what he could do with flowers or perfume.

Another quick read: On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees, one of the haul from Bicester mentioned in #54. I wouldn't exactly say I was disappointed in this book, although it is comfort reading of a sort, in that Rees believes that humanity has a future, given a measure of wisdom. Even if Rees has nothing in particular to say that's new, it may still be worth while for him, as a senior scientist and a Member of the House of Lords, to say it. "People more frequently need to be reminded than instructed," and Rees' prominence gives him a certain authority. So I've read the book, and will keep it, and will put it on my Yes We Do Have a Future shelf, along with Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature.

Which reminds me that yesterday was Presidents' Day in the USA, and that Abraham Lincoln's birthday was a week ago. I took a BB from sandydog1 and Toobusyreading for The Soul of America and just now spotted that clamairy had praised the audio version in her thread in the Green Dragon back in January.

Another quick read completed: On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees. This was one of the haul from Bicester mentioned back in #54. I don't know that Rees has anything particularly new or original to say, but it is probably still worth while for him, as a senior academic and scientist and a member of the House of Lords, to say it. At least he believes we do have a future, given a reasonable measure of wisdom. Anyway, I bought it (special order from an indie bookshop too!) and read it and will keep it on my Yes We Do Have A Future shelf, alongside Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature.

Which reminds me that Abraham Lincoln's birthday was a week ago. I took a BB from TooBusyReading and Sandydog1 for The Soul of America by Jon Meacham, and then noticed that clamairy had praised the audio version in her thread in the Green Dragon back in January.

Just started The Pike by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a biography of the extraordinary Italian writer and demagogue Gabriele D'Annunzio. I got this as a Christmas present a few years ago and it's been on TBR ever since. I may or may not finish it, depending on my tolerance for one of the most loathsome human beings I've ever encountered.

Guess what just arrived in the mail: a couple of tiny postcard books from Atlantis Books on the Greek island of Santorini. I'm going there (inshallah) in mid-March. The island is an arc around a volcanic caldera that is imagined to be the site of the eruption that destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete and gave birth to the legend of Atlantis. I'll try to post some scans of the covers tonight, but the ones I just uploaded from work look crappy on preview although they're fine in my member gallery.

I note that there is a dormant group called Bookstore Tourism. I'd like to see it revived but don't fancy taking it on myself.

Having another go at putting in covers for the little books from Atlantis Books.



That's better. Each is only 28 pages or less, and comes with an envelope so you can write on the flyleaf and use it like a postcard. Both covers are the same except for the author and title. (Edited to correct my bad grammar.)

And what have I been doing over this past weekend? I've been back in England, that's what.

When I got to Bicester I found the following lovelies waiting for me:

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis
What Jane Austen Ate and What Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool
The Railways by Simon Bradley
The Second Man by Edward Grierson
Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman
In Matto's Realm by Friedrich Glauser
Imprimatur by Monaldi & Sorti
Mozart's Journey to Prague and a selection of Poems by Eduard Mörike
Something of his Art by Horatio Clare
Logicomix by Doxiadis
The Soul of America by Jon Meacham
Empty Planet by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Not Much of an Engineer by Stanley Hooker
The Capitalby Robert Menasse (no touchstone for the English translation yet).

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture I read some while back from the Canberra library and now I have my own copy. Logicomix is my first ever graphic novel.

What Jane Austen Ate ... gets regularly recommended on LT. The Railways got a thumbs-up from hfglen. The Second Man was a recommendation from NinieB --a crime novel with an interesting piece of court business (well, interesting to lawyers, anyway). The next 4 were all discussed enthusiastically by various other LTers. The Soul of America was yet another LT recommendation by clamairy, among others.

Not Much of an Engineer was something I came upon during the course of a discussion in the Green Dragon about the Spitfire. It's the autobiography of an engineer who worked for Rolls-Royce, on, among other things, superchargers for the Merlin aircraft engine.

Empty Planet and The Capital must be added to the growing number of books I bought because of a review in The Economist. (Some really great reviews in both the Economist and the Financial Times. For example, I bought Music at Midnight by John Drury on the strength of an Economist review, and wasn't disappointed.)

And I now have Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian by Holdsworth waiting at home. That's 15 in all.

And what was I doing in England? Getting vaccinated for my forthcoming trip to Africa, and going to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Haydn's The Seasons, based on James Thomson's long English poem of the same name. London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sophie Bevan, Mark Padmore (of whom I have been a total fanboi for years) and a baritone whose name escapes me at the moment, with Vladimir Jurowski conducting. The Seasons is not as often performed as Haydn's other great oratorio The Creation, but is completely satisfying in its own way. When Haydn wrote The Seasons, he would have been about the same age as I am now, so there is hope for me yet. Oh, and the text for The Seasons (and for The Creation as well) was written by an Austrian civil servant named Gottfried van Swieten. He was the head of the Imperial Library and he has another claim to fame: he invented the library card catalogue.

I read most of What Jane Austen Ate ... on the flight home, and started Something of His Art last night.

And now a small confession of my own stupidity. The copy of Imprimatur is of the German translation, which isn't a lot of use to me. Oddly, Amazon UK no longer lists the English translation among new books but does list the German one. Having looked at the listing again, the header actually does say "German", so I suppose it's my own fault. The English one is available from resellers.

In other words, if you click incautiously you may well end up buying a book you didn't want, as I did.

Another wishlist item from an Economist review: Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer. Going on the Economist's review, it looks just like my kind of grammar and style book. I note that the review also mentions another book that I have and like very much, Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style.

I’ve been a bit quiet here lately but I wanted to catch upon a couple of things I’ve read recently.

The first was In Matto’s Realm. This was a BB from someone but I can’t remember who. Mystery story which is set in a Swiss mental hospital—“Matto” is the spirit of insanity. It’s hard to describe this book: it’s certainly not a classic murder mystery although there is at least one murder in it, and a policeman, who is apparently unsuccessful in solving the mystery. I say apparently because there are two solutions given for the mystery and I’m still unsure which was the real one. But this is part of the point—we are in Matto’s realm where strange things happen, and who knows what is real? Oh, and the voice on the radio? In 1936? We aren’t told who it was, but it’s not hard to guess. More of Matto’s realm.

All up, a strange and interesting book.

Glauser was a Swiss who was apparently a really messed up person, and spent time in both prison and psychiatric hospital. Several other of his books have been translated and might well be worth looking for.

The next is The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This was my introduction to the loony world of Flavia and the other de Luces. I enjoyed it very much, but OMG isn’t Flavia terrifying? Actually, all the sisters are terrifying in their different ways. My goodness, what a family.

I know that Alan Bradley is Canadian and had never been to England when he started writing about Flavia. I found it pretty convincing, but I doubt whether an English Flavia would have described herself as “home free” at the period of the setting. I spotted a couple of other minor things like that, but not enough to revoke my willing suspension of disbelief.

I was reminded somewhat of The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, mostly because schoolboy conjuring figures in both and both authors are Canadian. But of course Davies takes the ideas to some much deeper places.

And just to finish off, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian by Sir William Holdsworth. This book originated as a series of lectures, so it’s not a comprehensive treatise on the topic. More like Holdsworth’s Guide to what is to be found in Dickens. I didn’t actually learn much—most of the formal history of the English court system I knew already,but it was still fun reading.

Update on the family pets: here's Kenny the little coloured pony after his first outing as a jumper and his first clear round:


See, he got a ribbon and all! If he keeps going out as a jumper he won't be such a chubby boy for much longer.

The rider is my wife's friend Nat, who runs the stable where Kenny lives.

>120 haydninvienna: What a beautiful horse!

>120 haydninvienna: Kenny is beautiful! Love his brown spots..or maybe they're black. Still beautiful.

Hello Haydn! Just checking in - have not been on LT for a while and catching up with folks here. Congratulations on being able to attend a performance of The Seasons and the Dickens lecture series book sounds fascinating. It took me a while to wrap my head around the Chancery Court, as I think we discussed earlier; it was a bit like The One Ring as a malevolent force in the background. I'm currently on Our Mutual Friend as we wrap up our Dickens in the F2F Dickens book group. No definite idea what we'll do when we reach the end of this novel; maybe Wilkie Collins?

Have a great spring and thanks for posting such a beautiful horse picture. Congrats on his ribbon!

>122 Carol420: Black. Yes, he is a pretty boy, insn't he?

Thanks all for the good wishes. >123 threadnsong: I read Our Mutual Friend years ago, and maybe I should do so again. The Holdsworth book I mentioned in #119 suggests that Dickens' portrayal of the Court of Chancery was pretty accurate for the time in which the book was set. Wilkie Collins would make an interesting comparison with Dickens. They were contemporaries and friends. Collins is less familiar now than Dickens, but I think that in some ways Collins was the better writer. Certainly he created at least one character (Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White) who is something like a real person.

I’m in Bicester this weekend and in the British Heart Foundation shop found a book by Malcolm Pryce, of “Aberystwyth” fame: The Case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste. You can read the description on Goodreads as well as I can, and I noticed that someone compared it to a mix of Richard Hannay and Robert Rankin. There’s only 2 reviews on LT, and a few more on Goodreads, but one which makes me a trifle uneasy talks about Pryce’s obvious love for the pre-nationalisation GWR. I hope it’s not too overburdened with steam minutiae. Still, for £2 it was worth a shot.

I haven't posted here for a few weeks, but a quick update:

The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste was actually decent, probably more so if you're a serious train nerd. I like trains, but not quite to the extent of being a nerd.

Other things I've read that left some pleasant memories:
• The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making--This is supposed to be a kids' book, but I can't help but love a book whose author could write a sentence like this: "... September (who is a 12-year-old girl) read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.”?
• The Chronicles of Isambard Smith series--Space Captain Smith and 5 sequels--silly steampunk space opera, not great literature but good fun--at least for those of us brought up on Biggles and Battler Britton
• Absolutely on Music by Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa

Then to Porto in Portugal to visit the Livraria Lello bookshop, which unfortunately has Harry Potter connections--unfortunately because the place is swamped with Potter-heads, to the extent that it's the only bookshop I know of anywhere that charges admission--which you get refunded off the price of any books you buy--and of course I bought books--see here.

Quick trip to Maastricht for a second amazing bookshop: Boekhandeln Dominicanen, which is its current name after a couple of changes of owner. This is a shop built inside an old Dominican church with an unusual history. For what I bought see here.

Then a few days DNBR on Rhodes which led to reading:
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami
• Le Grand Meaulnes
• The Night Circus
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
• Just One Damned Thing After Another
• Imprimatur
all of which I enjoyed in their different ways, and to starting
• The Green Man which so far is a DNF--I didn't care at all for Amis's lecherous, alcoholic protagonist.

Then a quick trip to Bucharest on the way home from Rhodes to visit yet another amazing bookshop: Cărturești Carusel. For what I bought see here.

Incidentally, all this travel is because of a coincidence of 2 things: the holy month of Ramadan, during which our office goes on short hours; and my realisation that my Qatar Airways frequent flyer account had about 3X the number of miles that I thought. Since the only good frequent-flyer mile is one that you've already spent (because then the airline can't take it away), I spent them.

Edited to fix link.

>126 haydninvienna: I loved The Night Circus.

As I said in the Bookstore Tourism group, I'm visiting Toronto on 28 June with my younger daughter, who doesn’t read (but who turns 21 on 1 July, and whose name is Laura—how cool is that?) so can’t be too big on bookstores. Does anyone have a must-visit shop in Toronto within easy public transport reach of Union Station?

Back in Bicester on Friday morning. Spent Friday doing odd jobs around the house and then lunch with my wife at a local antique and bric-à-brac place called The Old Flight House, which is directly opposite the RAF station at Weston on the Green. ("RAF station" makes it sound grander than it is: no screaming jet fighters, just parachutists and gliding.) the The shop is the old officers' and sergeants' messes. It has a decent café and among the furniture and whatever (they sell all kinds of stuff) are some books. They don’t really organize it like a bookshop though. You can certainly find bookcases with books, and the books are for sale, but the bookcase might be mostly inaccessible behind an immovably large chair, or have fragile-looking and unstable glassware on top of it. I noticed a nice Folio Boethius, but it was £30 and I don’t want The Consolations of Philosophy quite that much. In the evening, dinner with my wife at the Turkish restaurant in Bicester and on getting back home finally passed out, not having had much sleep the night before.

I travelled back to Heathrow by train, necessarily passing through central London. Since I had some time in hand, I grabbed the opportunity of an unplanned visit to Hatchards, in Piccadilly, said to be the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded in 1797 and at the same address in Piccadilly since 1801. The interior is rather like a high class Waterstones, which is what it is. The Hatchards group (there are 4 Hatchards shops in London), like Hodges Figgis in Dublin, is owned by Waterstones, and the Waterstones mothership is a bit further down Piccadilly. I didn’t have much time so I got my wishlist up on the phone and went looking purposefully rather than just browsing. I found and bought
• Ice by Anna Kavan
and
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

Both of these were BBs, the first from lilisin here and the second from japaul here.

I also looked for, but didn’t find, 2 more BBs:
• A Corner of White
and
• Together: Our Community Cookbook.

I went into the Waterstones mothership looking for those 2 and didn’t find either one—even actually asked for the second one, but it was out of stock not only at that Waterstones but at all the nearby branches.

By then it was time to scarper out to Heathrow. On the flight I started reading Foucault’s Pendulum, which was a kind of delayed-action retrospective BB from pgmcc—retrospective because I bought the copy many years ago (the price on it is in euros, which indicates that I bought it in Dublin) and it was in the TBR until Peter mentioned it here. So far I’m enjoying it—I seem to recall somebody saying that it was “Dan Brown done right".

Something happened on the flight that’s never happened to me before: the Qatar Airways flight attendant saw me reading Foucault’s Pendulum and asked me about it. I really couldn’t describe it otherwise than by comparing it to Dan Brown. But she said she’d read The Name of the Rose and enjoyed it so there’s hope for her.

And further on pets: Kenny, the rescue pony, is now a jumper:



Edited to fix links (again--srsly, what's wrong with me?)

A bit of minor silliness on my part. (I’m seldom deliberately silly despite what my kids think.) I’m in Toronto with my younger daughter, whose birthday was yesterday. On Canada Day, yes. Most shops were closed, but the BMV Cafe on Queen St West was open. They had copies of Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore with the glow-in-the-dark cover, like the one I left in the cab, as mentioned in #40. (And as we were piffling about in #8 to #16.) This is one of not very many occasions when I have knowingly bought a book that I already own.

>130 haydninvienna: I'm glad you found a replacement. Someone is enjoying the one you left in the cab, I'm sure. I meant to comment back in June when you posted Kenny's picture...he is sooo beautiful and I know he's enjoying a much better life. Rescue horse...good for you! Rescue animals make such wonderful pets. Doesn't matter if they are dogs, cats, horses or whatever species.

Not exactly ramblings in L-space, but certainly in space. It's the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on Saturday (20:17 UTC on 20 July, whatever that corresponds to in your time zone). A book I read many years ago but don't own, Michael Collins' autobiography Carrying the Fire. Collins was the command module pilot on Apollo 11, the one who didn't land on the moon. He, and after him the command module pilots on the 5 remaining missions, were each the loneliest men in the universe for a few days. I might have to look out a copy and read it again, and I'll also have to find a copy of First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong.

I have seen two lists of "the best books" about Apollo 11 and the lunar landing program, and neither of them mentions Collins' book. Given the amount that has been written about the Apollo program, I suppose that's inevitable, but I remember Collins' book with affection as well-written and modest about his own considerable achievements. Apparently he never used a ghostwriter.

The lists I mentioned are here and here. A couple of things I've learned about Neil Armstrong: that when asked what he wanted to take to the moon, he answered "more fuel". A typical engineer's answer, and absolutely right. And that the personal item he took was a recording of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony.

Edited to add the bit about the Dvorak 8th, which unaccountably got lost when I first posted. Also I've now ordered the 2 books.

I mentioned a couple of dogs that we used to have, both gone now. Here they are in their prime.

Nikki:



Paris:



Yes, the Hilton sisters. We didn't name them.

They came from the same litter and are probably a cross between a Parson Russell (a long-legged Jack Russell terrier) and an Australian cattle dog, red phase. Nikki shows the Parson Russell ancestry, Paris got more of the cattle dog. They were medium size, bigger than a Jack Russell.

>133 haydninvienna: How beautiful! They look like real sweeties. Love the way they are marked...especially Nikki.

>134 Carol420: They were pretty good dogs. Great with the kids, surprisingly, because both Jack Russells and cattle dogs are inclined to be snappy. Good-natured except one night when somebody got into the house with larcenous intent and found Paris coming the other way ready to defend her home and people. I reckon he was still running when the police caught him.

>135 haydninvienna: Good dog, Paris! We had a neighbor that had a Jack Russell...Klondike. That dog was smarter than some people I've met.

I've been pretty quiet in this group for a while but I still lurk. But a noteworthy event has occurred. If you look all the way up to #2, you will see mention of Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. This was one of the unfinished books that was on my coffee table on 20 October last year, when I decided to plunge into Talk and start my own thread. The copy that I had then got left in a cab, and I bought a replacement which didn't have the distinctive yellow and white cover (the yellow glows in the dark, you know), and then in Toronto in July I bought another one with the "proper" cover, and now I've read it. I loved it. I'm still looking for Robin Sloan's follow-up Sourdough, and I gather he now has a prequel to Mr Penumbra out.

Just for the sake of something or other, the list of unread books then was:

The Pincers of Death. by Toby Frost
Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett
The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit by P G Wodehouse
This Book Is Full of Spiders by David Wong
Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Wellmania by Brigid Delaney
A Spirit of Play by David Malouf
Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins

I've read the ones struck through: 7 out of 14. I can probably declare the Kant a DNF. Maybe I'll try The Rosie Project next.

>137 haydninvienna: Very glad to see you made it through so many books from last year! I finished The Bone Reader that I had started then put on the shelf till this summer. And decided that by Part II I was done with Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I know we have come a long way in research and appreciation for other cultures, and perhaps we could not have done so without Prof. Campbell's research, but the bright neon flashing of the now-discredited research of Robert Graves and, to a large extent, the Oedipal obsession of Freud that form so much of Campbell's research make it a difficult slog. Having to look at this research thru a modern lens just made the read so much more difficult.

However, I'm finding the research Thomas Keneally does into the Irish Young Republicans in the years after the Potato Famine to be extraordinary and perhaps that is why I keep reaching for that book to read it chapter by chapter, then post onto my reading page. The book is The Great Shame and I will feel a sense of accomplishment when I finish it. Probably some time next year.

Loved your story of searching for the "proper" cover for "Penumbra"!

>138 threadnsong: I decided some time back that even if Graves was a great poet (I have several of his books of poetry), he wasn't much of a mythologist, except possibly as a creator rather than a student. (If I remember correctly, C S Lewis invented the word "mythonomer" for a student of myth.)

Some recent reading.

Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis. I knew about the "set up", of course (that archy is a cockroach who is the reincarnation of a free-verse poet, and types secretly at night by jumping on the keys of a typewriter) but had never read any of the actual verses. Well, now I have, and I know why the book has stayed in print for 90-odd years. "archy" is a profound philosopher as well as a poet. His outpourings would be endlessly quotable except that the peculiar structure of the verse makes it difficult to separate a quotation cleanly. "archy's" rhymes are sometimes as good as Ogden Nash's:

the quite irrational ichneumon
is such a fool it s almost human

And I love this little vignette about the ghosts in Westminster Abbey:

one of the most pathetic
sights however
is to see the ghost of queen
victoria going out every
evening with the ghost
of a sceptre in her hand
to find mr lytton strachey
and bean him it seems she beans
him and beans him and he
never knows it

When that was written, Lytton Strachey would still have been alive, and his notorious book Eminent Victorians with its "elegant, energetic character assassinations" still fresh.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. I’ve seen this compared to Jasper fforde and with The Third Policeman, and I could add Malcolm Pryce’s “Aberystwyth” books and The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, which I’ve got somewhere and never finished. Berry's book exists somewhere inside a geometrical figure of which those are the corners. Although it plays with some noir tropes, it doesn’t have the real hard-boiled feel of Dashiell Hammett. I enjoyed it. It makes somewhat more sense than The Third Policeman, and you can decide for yourself whether that’s a good thing.

The Flying Visit by Peter Fleming supposes that in 1940, Hitler made a "flying visit" to England. His intention was just to fly over it for purposes of propaganda, but there was this time-bomb in a flask of vegetable juice, wasn't there, which failed to kill him (shades of Georg Elser's unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life in Munich in 1938, the anniversary of which took place this past week) but destroyed the aircraft he was flying in, so he landed by parachute in Oxfordshire and was taken for a Hitler impersonator at a village fancy-dress ball. Of course a British agent spots him as the real deal and he is taken prisoner, but then what are the British to do with him? The problem is that the Germans had foreseen the possibility of something happening to Der Führer, and had had a double ready to take his place. They were therefore in a position to denounce the one held by the British as an imposter. So what were the British to do? They sent him back.

Fleming's foreword is dated 13 June 1940. The book is a comedy, which sets out to make Hitler ridiculous. It was still possible to do so then.

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. I suppose this is a black comedy. It's certainly a comedy, and given that the whole body of undergraduates at Oxford commits suicide for love of the eponymous semi-competent stage magician, it would appear to be fairly black. Like P G Wodehouse but with doomed love and suicide, perhaps.

ETA I found a copy of Sourdough and read it, and thought it was great.

I mentioned C S Lewis above. I'm not myself a reader of the Narnia books, but when you mention Lewis a lot of people immediately think of Narnia. Some surprising people turn out to have been Narnia fans: Neil Gaiman, for example.

However.

I took a serious BB from stringcat3 for The Magician's Book by Laura Miller (see here). It’s a marvellous book, about C S Lewis’s Narnia books and her own experiences with them, and relevantly about Lewis’s opinions and even his life. I think I’ve read almost everything Lewis ever wrote for publication except his fiction, and I think Miller gets closer to the man Lewis than most other writers on him (certainly closer than the “Lewis industry”). I particularly appreciated her mentions of how good Lewis’s prose is, but that’s just me—for me, the description of a book as being “beautifully written” is an active turn-off. Interestingly, she quotes both Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman as appreciative of the clarity of Lewis’s prose. Seriously, if you love the Narnia books, The Lord of the Rings, and even Philip Pullman’s books, Laura Miller has insightful things to say about them, and much other fantasy as well. It’s one of those books that gives you a little shock of recognition every few pages. And I note with pleasure that her list of books that are “like” Narnia (for some value of “like”) includes China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun—I sometimes seem to be the only person who liked that book. And Finn Family Moomintroll too! Unfortunately, the website www.themagiciansbook.com, referred to in the notes at the end, appears to be defunct.

I can't resist quoting a couple of sentences from stringcat3: "Never mind 'wish list' - just buy it already! You won't be disappointed. The breadth of Miller's learning is impressive, but her writing is so heartfelt, so accessible, so resonant, that you don't get any of that 'look at me being smart' feeling that is typical when reading many of her contemporaries ...".

I seem to have passed the BB on in the Green Dragon. Maybe we need a new term to take the place of "BB"—something indicating an infection that can be passed on.

I’m now in Vienna with my wife, and it’s all very decorated. I love Vienna. We had a good dinner last night (which was our wedding anniversary) and we are going to the opera tonight.

Peace and joy to all. If you celebrate Christmas, have a wonderful one; if you don’t celebrate Christmas, have a wonderful day. Same for St Stephen’s Day. I’m feeling under his influence a tiny bit: Stephansdom is just up the street.

>141 haydninvienna:



Happy Anniversary to you and your wife. What a lovely place to spend it. Have a very Merry Christmas and wishing you all the best in the New Year.

Being in Vienna, I read a book set here:The Second Rider by Alex Beer, set in the decayed Vienna immediately after the First World War. Smuggling, war crimes and murder, in a Vienna very unlike the cosy and affluent city of 2019. Pretty good, despite an awkward translation that has Viennese of a century ago speaking in modern slang.

>142 Carol420: thanks from us both. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas also.

>143 haydninvienna: LOL! Authors do sometimes take literary liberties to excess...or maybe it was the translator that couldn't find a word that really expressed the correct translation.

>145 Carol420: The specific example was that Inspector Emmerich refers mentally to an inexperienced medical examiner as a “newbie”, an expression I dislike at the best of times. The standard-English word would be “novice”. There was nothing in the context to suggest that “novice” wouldn’t have been appropriate. I know that Viennese German is an idiosyncratic thing, but nothing suggested that Emmerich wasn’t thinking in standard German, even though tinged with contempt.

Given that this thread has now been going for over 2 years, it's probably time for a new one. I still like the title, but might have to adapt it a bit.

As to the opera, it was La Bohème, which neither of us had ever seen before. Italian grand opera isn't really my thing, but my wife adores it. We agreed afterwards that La B and Madam Butterfly* are musically pretty much interchangeable—you could swap arias from one to the other and a listener who didn't understand Italian probably wouldn't notice. As you would expect from the Vienna State Opera, it was a totally competent performance, beautifully sung and beautifully played. I don't see myself going to any lengths to see La B again any time soon though: if I were going to another Puccini opera, it would be Tosca (which I actually do kind of like, even allowing for the improbable story), or Turandot. "Improbable story", heh. They all have improbable stories. Anyone who has seen Madam Butterfly, or even listened to a recording: did you ever wonder what the home life of Lieutenant and Mrs Pinkerton was like after they returned from Japan?

* Yes, I know that it's becoming conventional to call it Madama Butterfly, but I think that looks silly.

And just in case I don't manage to do so later on (and it's just about 2020 in Australia and points east already anyway), Happy New Year to you all, and let there be lots of good reading.

Thank you so much, haydninvienna, for your insights into so many books of so many genres, your recommendation above for Laura Miller's book on C.S. Lewis, and your bits of where you are when.

And seconding >142 Carol420:'s wishes for a Happy Anniversary! Celebrating in such a wonderful place at such a celebratory time with an Italian opera to boot. What a great story you paint.

Side note: I almost went to Vienna. Almost. Vienna and Salzburg (to see some ancestral stuff from the 1740's). Then I found out the same weekend that Vladimir Horowitz was performing a concert (I was a student in Paris at the time) and the travel plans went out the window. Have never made it back to Austria, though I did travel to Germany soon after reunification. But I got to see Horowitz live. In Paris. And it don't get much better than that!

>149 threadnsong: But I got to see Horowitz live. I agree, it doesn’t get much better than that. I’m scheming to get to see Menahem Pressler live before he leaves us.

I have 2 memories of Salzburg. The first is the time that I accidentally locked myself in a toilet in the castle. We were on a bus tour. Frantic wife and kids outside encouraging the management to get me out. They had to take the door right off.

The second was just before Easter a few years ago, when I went to a performance of the “short” version of Bach’s B Minor Mass at the Mozarteum. It was just after the terror attacks at Brussels Airport. The choir and orchestra were from Dresden in Germany. After the performance, the choir gave as an encore the Dona Nobis Pacem, which wasn’t part of the original program, as (as the director said) a gesture of European solidarity against terror.

>150 haydninvienna: Thank you for these great memories, and I hope you get a chance to see Menahem Pressler. Right now, I'm very glad I got to see Rush live a couple of times. I had no idea Neil Peart was such a prolific author as well as an amazing drummer *sniff*.

I totally love your honesty with your first memory of Salzburg! Hope they fixed the door as I totally doubt you were the first person who found the lock to be very effective!

And how amazing about the performance you mentioned. I just love that the choir performed that song and for those reasons. I added it to a Christmas/Yuletime performance I did last month as well. Seems like we always long for it and that song is just so perfect.

I rarely post here but I’m still a member and still lurking. I just wanted to say that I’m now reading A Promised Land by Barack Obama, prompted by cindydavid4, for exactly the reason she said—looking forward to the departure of his successor.

>152 haydninvienna: Aren't we all!!!!

Still going with A Promised Land, which I'm not going to say too much about other than that it's well written, and Mr Obama knows how to tell a story (probably not by native talent, since he mentions several times how he had to learn not to give over-detailed wonkish answers to questions). The thing I find fascinating though, having never been a policy-maker but having for many years worked close to them, is how much effort had to go into getting support for a measure from his own side. Where I came from, Ministers would introduce bills in Parliament, and since a minister is a member of the government and sits in Parliament, he or she can normally expect complete support. I have to keep in mind that the President does not sit in Congress and cannot rely on the support of even his or her "own" party.

Mr Obama comes across as a calm, reasonable, hard-working, decent human being. Just the sort of good bloke this Australian would love to have a beer with some time.

Hallo haydninvienna! Thank you for popping in and sharing a bit of what you are reading. Hope you are well these days.

And thanks for sharing your thoughts about the difference between Parliamentary vs. Congressional procedure that you found intriguing in A Promised Land. It bears contemplation. And I hope you do get to have a beer with the bloke you mention!

>155 threadnsong: I don't post much here these days, but I still read all the threads (so you have been warned). Most of my posting gets done in the Green Dragon (and i'm pretty sure I've seen you there too), but the GD has a rule about "no politics", so I posted about my admiration for Mr Obama here.

>156 haydninvienna: Love it! Well, I'm glad you do follow the threads. It's been a while since I visited Green Dragon and I should probably get back there for a pint.

Still lurking. I just popped in now to wish everybody a happy new year for 2022. Hoping it brings you lots of great reading.

Thank you for popping in! Have missed your ramblings in 2021, and hope all is well with both you and your reading.

>158 haydninvienna: Thank you. Best Wishes for 2022 to you.