Books Owned

I think I have somewhere around 800 books, but this depends on whether the three or four large boxes in my cupboard marked ‘Books’ actually contain books. Either way, that’s not very many, and I’m constantly worried that I don’t read enough.

In the six months when I was without a television, I reverted to being the voracious reader I used to be as a little child, and got through a good three or four books a week, several, funnily enough, picked up after reading about them on the weblog of Peter Lindberg, who passed the baton to Rob. But since I bought a telly, I’m back to slumping in front of it, flicking through a magazine (Heat or The Wire) and idly wondering whether Craig is actually going to rape Anthony on Big Brother.

Since folk who’ve been passed the baton in the past have detailed their rigorous shelving systems, I’ll reveal mine: absolute chaos. When I did a quick count of the shelves in the hall to estimate how many books I have, the first four books I was faced with were A History Of British Socialism by Max Beer, The Overcoat And Other Short Stories by Nikolai Gogol, Ricki! by Robert Waldron (yep, that’s a biography of Rikki Lake!) and Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood. Which, I suppose, is fairly representative of my reading habits.

Last Book Bought

Erm, I’m not really sure. From the pile by my bed, it looks like it was either Dot In The Universe by Lucy Ellmann (a slightly histrionic but very funny novel about a series of reincarnations disguised by a cover that makes it look like shit chick-lit) or The Affluent Society by J.K. Galbraith, which is one of a fairly large number of books I own in order to better understand economics, but never get around to reading.

Last Book I Read

Again, I’m not sure, becuase I have a habit of reading at least two books at the same time. So it was either The Enchantment Of Lily Dahl by Siri Hustvedt (which like all her books starts well but ends, if not quite poorly, then less well) or Jonathon Coe’s excellent biography of B.S. Johnson, The Fiery Elephant. Books I’m currently reading include:

1. The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson - a lovely surprise gift that is so unbelievably fucking good I’m reading one of it’s 27 unbound sections each day to make it last as long as possible.

2. The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945-59 by Anne Massey - I’ve read this before, but picked it up to check some fact or other and got stuck in it again.

3. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 by Isaac Deutscher - this one will take me absolutely ages (it’s rather dry) and then I’ve got two more 500-page volumes of Deutscher’s Trot-fest to go. Reading Martin Amis’ wonderful Korba The Dread in Budapest has sparked off a bit of a communist history and biography jag.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me

Funnily enough, two of the five I would’ve picked are mentioned in Rob’s baton post, but I’ll leave them in.

1. The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy by the late Douglas Adams would probably make it onto a list like this drawn up by anyone of, roughly speaking, my generation. I read it when I was very little and loved it, and I’ve read the series more times than I should’ve since then. The radio series is also on my iPod at all times, for falling to sleep to when I don’t have a radio to hand.

2. The Secret History by Donna Tart is, frankly, a load of hackish crap, but it’s another one I’ve read far too many times, because it makes me nostalgic for the time I first read it, when it was happily and excitedly passed around among friends, and we all thought we were very clever and glamorous, just like the pretentious little tits that make up the cast of characters.

3. The Waste Land - A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound is a book I only got my hands on last year, having first borrowed it from a teacher when I was in the sixth form. The Waste Land is, I believe, the best poem in the English language, and one that points you in the direction of the highest of highlights in the history of literature, English or otherwise. This edition lets you see it being written, live, so to speak.

4. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley - a bit of a cheat picking an anthology, I suppose, but I love this book so much I keep all my favourite photographs of my friends and family inside it’s covers (sentimentalist that I am!). I don’t know where to start explaining why I like Borges, so I’ll be vague and just say that when I first read him, I knew that he was my writer, the one against whom all others are judged. Something like that, anyway.

5. The Fermata by Nicholson Baker - I could’ve picked anything by Baker to go here, really, but since this is the first book of his I read it just pipped The Mezzanine or Double Fold. Like Borges, I just plain love the way Baker writes: if I could write novels, they would be like his. (This is the reason why my friend Hannah interrupts me when I say, ‘Ooh, I’m reading this great book…’ to mock me with, ‘…yeah, yeah. It’s about a small pile of salt dreaming about quantuum mechanics, isn’t it?’)

Two honourable mentions that might have made the above list if I’d been writing it on another day: something or other by Paul Auster and Edward II by Christopher Marlowe.

I’m passing this on to…

Glasgow’s Squarespace-powered weblogging crew, comprising Donna, Genna, Mike D., plus Pat. I think I’m meant to do five, but I don’t know any more folk with weblogs, so if anyone wants to take up the baton and post their answers here, let me know.

Update 10/08/05: Mike has taken up the baton. I love the ordering of books into categories like spiritual hippy druggy crap and zeitgeisty generation x-ables!

The pages are odd texts, mostly observations about how the world works, both dull and fascinating at the same time. By way of an example, here is today’s entry on shooting arrows:

A man who wants to send an arrow very far from the bow must be standing entirely on one foot and raising the other so far from the foot he stands on as to afford the requisite counterpoise to his body which is thrown on the front foot. And he must not hold his arm fully extended, and in order that he may be more able to bear the strain he must hold a piece of wood which there is in all crossbows, extending from the hand to the breast, and when he wishes to shoot he suddenly leaps forward at the same instant and extends his arm with the bow and releases the string. And if he dexterously does every thing at once it will go a very long way.

You can subscribe to two RSS feeds, the first begins at page one, the second begins, for today at least, at page 385, so you can read along with Matt, and me, and, presumably, a huge number of other folk. I suggest the latter - there’s something rather comforting about knowing we’re all on the same page.

Thanks Dad!

The John Murray Archive contains more than 150,000 letters and manuscripts by Byron, Scott, Darwin and countless other figures of global significance.

The rich and diverse range of subjects includes archaeology, classical studies, bibliography, history and scholarship, art, architecture, art history and collecting, cookery, gardening, music, theatre and children’s books.

The travel and exploration papers contained in the Murray Archive include papers from David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton, as well as manuscripts of reviews by Sir Walter Scott.

Quite a coup for the Library, then, and, since they plan to open parts of the Archive to the public ‘within months’, with online access to follow, really rather exciting news.

Update: …or possibly not. Keen reader Bob Mottram (relation) just emailed, pointing to this report, from March of last year, in which John Sutherland, of UCL and the Grauniad, describes the collection as a ‘plumless pudding’.

In brief, De Santillana & Von Dechend reckon that common themes in the mythology of unconnected cultures are not evidence of the collective unconscious Chinese-whispering records of cataclysmic events in pre-history, but proof that myths are codified memetic transmission devices for detailed astrological and pseudo-scientific knowledge from the earliest human civilisations. Something like that, anyway.

They seem to be on to something, or at least capable of forging links between myths and astronomical knowledge - they’re certainly convincing when it comes to, say, the assertion that all primitive cultures understood equinoctal precession, and that the structure of a whole host of myths can be interpreted as relating to that knowledge - but I’ll save further notes for a future post when I’ve finished the book.

For the time being, I’ll just share this snippet quoted from the Ras Shamra texts, myths of the Ugarit (better known as Canaanites), those clever folk who invented the 30-letter ur-alphabet from which all phonetic alphabets derive. For obvious reasons, it made me piss myself:

She seizes the Godly Mot
With swords she does cleave him
With fan she does winnow him
With fire she does burn him
With hand-mill she grinds him
In the field she does sow him
Birds eat his remnants
Consuming his portions
Flitting from remnant to remnant.

(Concerned readers will be pleased to learn that my godly namesake somehow manages to spring back to life a couple of clay tablets later.)

It’s mostly a list of examples of index wit. Here’s the entry for God in the index to Francis Wheen’s excellent How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World:

…accepted by Newton; angered by feminists and gays; appoints American coal-owners; approves of laissez-faire economics; arrives in America; asked by Khomeini to cut off foreigners’ hands; believed to have created humans 10,000 years ago; could have made intelligent sponges; doesn’t foresee Princess Diana’s death; helps vacuum-cleaner saleswoman; interested in diets; offers investment advice; praised by Enron chairman; produces first self-help manual.

Sadly, Hensher confirms that the following entry in the index of a Catholic encyclopaedia is apocryphal:

Woman: see Sin

As is usually the case with this sort of pseudo-intellectual broadsheet fluff, the author is writing thinly-veiled advertorial, shilling his new novel, The Fit. For once, I’m glad of the heads up: Hensher has his protaganist dream of compiling an Index To The History of The World, one ‘so beautiful and complete that there would be no reason whatever to write the book itself.’ Not knowing Hensher’s past novels, I haven’t a clue whether this will make for sub-Borgesian pap or the sort of wilfully arcane intertextual mucking about that makes me weak at the knees (arguably the same thing) but I can’t wait for it to hit the shelves so I can find out.

Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allen Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the centre of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee’s “Eternal Orang-utan”, which would end up by writing all the known books in the cosmos.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blurb that lists quite so many things and people by which or with whom I have been horribly, horribly obsessed over the years. (Even Orang-utans! I loved those cheeky Sumatran hominidae, and they taught me never to say out loud words I have only read, after a childhood humiliation experience prompted by my repeatedly referring to them as orange you-tans.)

This, of course, means that the book is as likely to be a hideous disappointment as it is the perfect novel for me.

We shall see.

I very much resent it in the West when people - maybe with all the good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, “It’s their culture.”

It’s like… saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches.

First of all, there are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible, and we should [all] fight against it. We shouldn’t accept them. Second of all, women in Iran and in Saudi Arabia don’t like to be stoned to death.

I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve had to say words to that effect, only to have them dismissed as the inevitable opinion of a blinkered, patriarchal, Western hegemonist oaf. I don’t know why I care what the sort of condescending prat who cites ‘cultural difference’ as a justification for stuff that is plain old wrong, but I shall be using Nafisi as ammunition against them from now on.

Anyway, the brouhaha surrounding Nafisi’s book passed me by, but going by the following snippet from a glowing notice in The Guardian alone, it looks to be well worth seeking out.

In her class Humbert Humbert’s seizure of his nymphet’s life and identity becomes a metaphor for the way the radical Islamic state was treating its women - not least in his recording that it was Lolita who initiated their sexual relationship, the adolescent who seduced her stepfather; it felt as though radical Islam was blaming women.

It has many, many temptations. Thus far, I’ve managed to restrict myself to two books that I’ve wanted for years.

I first saw a battered edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - A Facsimile & Transcript of the Original Drafts Including The Annotations of Ezra Pound at school. One of my two English teachers in the Sixth Form, Mr. F., was of the sort who had obviously watched Dead Poets Society one too many times, and fancied himself as an inspirational, groovy teacher. At the time we thought him a terrible embarrassment, but in retrospect he did a pretty decent job of turning a bunch of stoned schoolboys on to Modernist poetry, Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter. Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd is the only textbook I remember referring to, and I still don’t understand how the syllabus slipped past the Head of Department in a distinctly old-fashioned school.

Anyway, the self-appointed grandstanding super-hip teach, Mr. F., produced his annotated copy of The Waste Land with such a flourish that I believed his claims of its impossible rarity and great value, which - aside from the fact that it is a riveting look at a collaborative process that turned an unweildy epic into a dense, beautiful poem - made me really want a copy, while assuming that it would be forever out of reach. A quick search on Abe Books, and I am in touch with Francis Edwards of Haye-on-Wye, antiquarian booksellers since 1855, who have a First Edition. For £30. And now I have it, after a dozen years.

The second book is a little less exciting, and one I should really have bought years ago: Contemporary Artists, the weighty reference tome edited by Colin Naylor and Genesis P. Orridge. It has biographies, brief essays and statements on everyone from Abakanowicz, Magdalena to Zox, Larry. Essential stuff, to the extent that I’m beginning to think lustful thoughts about the 2nd and 3rd editions.

If you haven’t seen Abe Books before, my apologies for linking to it. It’s my most dangerous discovery on the web since I stumbled on that weird site where everything is for sale. It might not be as good as trawling a real bookshop and getting dust up your nose, but the arcane argot of booksellers - can that really be a VG 1st Ed. thus. 4to d/w? And with dec cl binding? - just about makes up for the lack of tactile browsing.

See also: Dotcom chapter of success, a Guardian piece on the site.