2019: my year of reading…

I’ve not done anywhere near as much reading this last year as I normally would, for a number of reasons, and recently have not felt able to settle down to anything as demanding as a full-length book, so for the last couple of months it has been magazines and online articles, mainly. I have acquired 30 new books this year – so some success on cutting down how many I buy – disposed of a good many more than that, and actually read 53 books in total, so just over one a week. I never imagined the total would drop so low…

I realise on looking through my reading log that I’ve spent a fair amount of time re-reading this year. At the end of 2018, I began working my way through the novels of Philip K Dick again, and got about half-way through them before I got side-tracked; I also re-read some Raymond Chandler, some Garrison Keillor and quite a lot of Ursula Le Guin, prompted by her death earlier in the year. Her work remains as powerful as ever for me, in many different ways. I’m looking forward to tacking her epic Always Coming Home next year.

Why so much re-reading? Looking at my shelves I see that there are so many old favourites still there, which have survived the annual cull of books which head their way to Amnesty International, and I feel drawn to revisit them, and the pleasure I recall in the past. I used to have the feeling, “well, I’d like to re-read that one day…” and move on; nowadays, something follows that thought up with, “get on with it, then!” So I have.

Like many of you, I have a fair number of what might loosely be called “coffee-table books” in a dismissive sort of way: I mean the kind of large format, illustrated books that don’t necessarily lend themselves to a cover-to-cover read, but are for deep browsing; I’ve spent a good deal of time revisiting those this year, too, especially the ones on travel and exploration. Very satisfying.

But it hasn’t been completely a year of re-reads. New discoveries have included R H Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy – there seems to be a good deal of First World War fiction out there that I still haven’t discovered – and John Barton’s marvellous book on the history of the bible, which I really enjoyed and found very thought-provoking, too. And I really liked the French writer Gilbert Sinoué’s Le Livre de Saphir .

Now we come to statistics and awards. For some reason – and I do wish readers would enlighten me – the most popular post of the year by far has been my brief and instant reaction to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem The Wound in Time, which she wrote to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War. Other posts on poems from that war have also been pretty popular, along with my thoughts on Ismail Kadare’s novel about Stalinism in Albania, Le Grand Hiver. I’m pleased to be reaching such a wide variety of readers, and I still wish I head more from you…

My biggest disappointment this year has been my re-reading of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series; I wish I hadn’t bothered and then I might have retained more of my original admiration for his achievement. When researching for the post I just published on him, I noticed there were some prequels and linked short stories, which I will not be bothering with.

Once again, there is no award for weirdest book: obviously I’m not reading weird books at the moment…

I’ll give Philip Pullman my award for best new novel for The Secret Commonwealth, the second in his Book of Dust series. It is on a par with the first one, and I know I’ll have to wait another couple of years for the last in the series.

I’m cheating a bit here, but my award for best novel goes to Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which is coming up for a re-read pretty soon, so that I can dig a bit deeper than just the plot, and admire what she has done in writing a sequel to a novel no-one imagined there could ever be a sequel to. It’s clever, it’s serious, it’s thought-provoking, and for me everything that a good novel should be.

I haven’t read a great deal of non-fiction this year, but John Barton’s A History of the Bible was outstanding in its erudition, its clarity and its honesty. He isn’t afraid to dig deeply or to ask awkward questions, and yet the Christian scriptures are not diminished or undermined by his forensic examination.

Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad is easily my Book of the Year: it’s not a new novel, having been written before I was born and published in a number of incomplete versions in Soviet times. What we finally got this year was a very careful edition which is probably as complete and as accurate as can be with a work completed in such challenging circumstances, excellently translated and introduced, and superbly annotated: a work of love by Robert Chandler. It’s the prequel to the astonishing Life and Fate, which has rightly been called the twentieth century’s War and Peace. Only a Russian could have written it, and it is a tragedy that the horrendous experience of Russians during the Nazi invasion and occupation is not better known and understood in the West.

I wonder what next year will bring? So far, press articles about what’s coming up in the next few months have been rather unpromising. And I don’t have any particular plans in terms of what I want to read, although I am currently enjoying re-visiting old favourites, so there will probably more of those…

The Doomsday Book

   Way back when I was still a schoolboy I bought a remaindered book in a sale: The Doomsday Book, by Gordon Rattray Taylor. This must have been in the very early seventies, and I was reminded of this book and the way it shaped my life, when I came across a dusty and ancient copy of the book again a couple of weeks ago.

It was what would now be called popular science, and it was, as I recall, one of the earliest books to try and draw public attention to the problems of pollution, as these were known, seen and understood half a century ago. I remember being utterly shocked and horrified at the grim prognosis then, and vaguely recall a follow-up from the same author, called something like The Population Time-Bomb. For me, these were the first wake-up calls, the first awareness that as a species we were not innocent in our effects on the planet.

A few years later, as a student, I became a vegetarian, for health and ecological reasons, and began to try and be more careful about my impact on the planet. Over the years I have striven not to be wasteful and not to make trivial or unnecessary purchases; as re-use and recycling became more possible, I’ve tried to do these to the best of my ability, too. Lest anyone think that all I’m doing is virtue-signalling, I’ll admit to having owned and used a car for the last thirty years or so, although I’ll balance that by saying that I have never flown anywhere.

I know a good many people who have tried to operate in a similar fashion throughout their lives, too: I’m a member of a small food-buying co-op which comprises about a dozen households. And yet, as I read about the horrors of the climate emergency engulfing the planet, I feel increasingly that we’ve been pissing into the wind, or re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. I’m horrified at the world in which my children and grandchildren will have to live and grow old in. Where have we gone wrong? Because surely my generation bears a large share of the responsibility.

Our economic system has proved wonderful at making and selling stuff, and hiding its effect on our planet and on our individual health. And I’m not meaning to start an argument with feminists when I say that the system, over the past couple of generations, has engineered a shift in society and consumption habits which has meant that to support a family and a household and provide it with all the stuff it needs, it now takes both parents working.

Back in the days of the Cold War we used to talk about humans being the only species which had developed the means to destroy life on its home planet – and we meant through the use of nuclear weapons. Now we are managing to do it – a tad more slowly – through the manufacture and consumption of material goods.

I am incredibly pessimistic about our changing anything. First, the economic system will resist any attempt to curb its excesses: we can see that already. Second, we love the conveniences we are offered and don’t see the waste: the huge amount of energy needed to run data-centres so we can have everything in the cloud; the stupid waste of plastics in wrapping food, making one-use cups and bottles; the phenomenal amount of pollution created by cars… and so much more.

There is one factor I have identified and begun to think about over the last few years: the hippy movement of the late sixties and early seventies. It was all about self-liberation, breaking free of constraints, individual self-development – laudable aims in themselves, but so easily manipulated and perverted by the economic system into a chase after material objects and possessions, and the right to individual fulfilment and happiness through stuff. And because it was about individual happiness – allegedly – it gradually erased any reference to, or appreciation of anything shared or collective, including the shared planet. And it seems to me, once those floodgates were opened, the end was on its way. I’m as guilty as the rest of my generation here: the feelings of liberation were wonderful, and the costs only gradually became clear… and what we can now do about it, eludes me.

Philip Reeve: the Mortal Engines series

   Many years ago, while I was still teaching, Philip Reeve came to our school and did an inspiring writing workshop with our youngest students. This will have been at the time when this series of books was being published, and I remember thinking at the time that it was all rather in the shadow of Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. I binge-read the Reeve series when I was ill at the time and really enjoyed it: having recently been laid up for a couple of days I decided to repeat the experience, and have to say that I was rather disappointed…

It’s a much easier read, with plots that are less complex, although still extremely convoluted and confusing at times, and there are no deeper, underlying meanings for the interested reader to seek out, as there are throughout Pullman’s novels. The idea of constant warfare – Municipal Darwinism – between enormous mobile and travelling cities, is a very imaginative concept and one that Reeve carries off with great verve. He also has child/ adolescent heroes and heroines, who engage the reader, although they do lack a lot of the depth and development of Pullman’s characters. The underlying message is one about the wrecking of the planet through competition: the fixed, mobile, submarine and aerial cities are all vying with each other, screwing the past and the planet in order to survive. Where have we met this before?

I’m aware I’m treating Reeve as in Pullman’s shadow here, but I feel the comparisons are inevitable really. True, the stories are very different: Pullman’s parallel universe echoes our own and develops in a different but recognisable way and gains from the Brechtian effect of involving both alongside each other, whereas Reeve’s universe is set in a fantastical far future which sets his reader in a very different situation.

The target audience is rather different, too, I think. Pullman’s work is clearly accessible to younger readers, who will engage with it at the level on which they are capable and comfortable, and be challenged to grow up through their interaction with his ideas and characters; it’s equally accessible to adults who will be provoked by it in rather different ways. Reeve’s novels are certainly aimed at a young adult readership, but I’m not sure how challenging or satisfying they can be to an adult audience: I read them as pure escapism, and second time around I was rather underwhelmed. Pullman challenges us through encounters with violence and sexuality where Reeve, though acknowledging these aspects, skirts around them somewhat.

Mortal Engines is fast-paced, with multiple and interconnected storylines, and lots of cliff-hangers; shifting from plot to plot keeps use entertained and engaged; Reeve writes well. But there is nothing to slow down mere consumption of the plot: characterisation, apart from the main ones, is rather sketchy. At times I felt he lost control of the story and almost seemed to be making it up as he went along, but in the end I thought he was just about in control of his material: what it all lacked for me was depth.

I also found it hard to cope with the unevenness of tone: the comic character Professor Pennyroyal was annoying throughout and the episodes involving him detracted from Reeve’s attempts to be more serious, emphasising the far-fetched nature of the plot, and involving characters which never engaged our sympathies or loyalty. By the time I reached the final volume I was confused and itching to reach the end: Reeve was no longer master of so many plots and characters, even though he did manage to pull things together in a way in the closing pages, where he briefly explored the notion of humanity as a plague on the planet, and one worthy of being finally eliminated…

So, for me it bears one reading, for the originality of its conception and for being highly entertaining. But the notion of humanity as a scourge on the planet is insufficient to sustain four lengthy novels, and the notional utopia he establishes in the closing pages does not convince. However, he wasn’t writing for me…

His Dark Materials – the TV series

I’ve just finished watching the first series, so it’s time for a few reflections on how well the BBC and its collaborators have done with the first volume of Pullman’s trilogy. After the dire film The Golden Compass – of which my DVD has mysteriously lost itself – the bar was pretty low.

It’s a complex novel, both in terms of ideas and setting: Pullman makes his readers work reasonably hard, and it’s worth it. What the makers of the TV series threw out right from the start were the quaint alternative names – perhaps Victorian-sounding – for all sorts of objects and ideas. I hadn’t realised this initially, and on reflection I thought it was a pity, because in the novels it was one of the things that underlined the idea of Lyra’s Oxford and her world being a parallel universe that had evolved slightly differently from our own…

What I didn’t like: there was a lack of clarity, right until the final episode, as to what the aims of the Magisterium were, and who the Authority was, and quite a lot of vagueness about Dust. These are some of the complex ideas Pullman wanted his readers to be wrestling with, and obviously it’s easier to present them in the pages of a novel: it doesn’t make for very gripping television, and so there were clunky sections at various points where necessary information was dumped rather crudely to enable viewers to get with the plot… However, I was very pleased to see that no punches were pulled in that final episode, about the nature of Dust and its link to the awful Christian concept of original sin, and its malign effects on our society.

I also didn’t feel that daemons got a big enough look in. Perhaps it was very expensive and difficult technically to render them (I don’t know) but only the major characters seemed to be accompanied by theirs whereas everyone has one in Lyra’s world. However, the idea that a person can be separated from their daemon in a number of different ways, was clearly established.

There was far more that I admired than disliked, however. I thought the casting had been brilliantly done, especially shown in the complex and shifting relationship between Lyra and Mrs Coulter, her mother. I was also impressed by the multiracial nature of the casting and felt somewhat guilty that in my imagining of the novels as I had first read them, I had visualised all the characters as white… truly, stereotypes and conditioning run very deep. The sets, and the use of locations, were both superb throughout, I thought, and Lyra’s Oxford was a pretty good representation of an alternative universe.

The adaptation was really well done – it seems to have had Pullman’s imprimatur – and there were times when I was astonished, and reminded just how brilliantly a visual medium can telescope and replace many pages of textual description and explanation when it’s carefully and subtly done. Interweaving strands from both Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife was clever, and worked well, with the idea of both Lyra and Will moving into another universe in the closing moments of the final episode promising much for the next series, which I await eagerly.

For a number of reasons I wasn’t able to watch the episodes as they were transmitted, and, whilst not exactly bingeing to catch up, did find myself enjoying being able to watch a couple of episodes at a time back-to-back. I’m sure some will find aspects they did not like, and be far more critical than I have been. I cannot imagine the books better translated to the screen: I thought the series was truly marvellous.

Christmas in literature

As I grow older I find Christmas more and more difficult; nothing seems to remind me more clearly of just how old I am, and the tree and the decorations each year bring a sadness as I recall the innocent happinesses of the past years, of my own childhood and then that of our children, moments that can be remembered but never re-experienced, times, meals and presents I particularly appreciated, people who are no longer here…

I love the idea of a midwinter festival, marking the solstice, and the time when the days cease to grow shorter, but actually begin to lengthen in preparation for the renewal of life and the eventual arrival of spring. The worst is over. It’s right that there should be a time of rest and recuperation, some feasting, and the sharing of food and gifts with those we love and care about is surely part of that. The Christian festival, for those who celebrate it as such, is clearly part of that ancient idea of new life and new hope; even if older ideas and festivals were colonised and annexed by the new religion, that doesn’t really seem to matter to me; everyone recognises the same new beginnings in their own ways.

I find it sad that every year there is the commercial urge to an ever more crass blow-out of binge-eating, drinking and spending, in which certainly the religious and spiritual aspects of the festival are totally lost, but even the symbolism of marking midwinter.

I racked my memory for instances of Christmas festivities in literature, but was surprised at how few I could summon up. Obviously there is the maudlin and sentimental Dickens – although I can happily watch the Muppets Christmas Carol every year! There is the one Sherlock Holmes story where Conan Doyle also cashed in, The Blue Carbuncle; the over-rich Christmas pudding which the boy is not allowed to eat, in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, and the feast and squabbles and the presents of air rifles in To Kill A Mockingbird. And I can’t omit Milton’s poem On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, nor the episode in Emma where the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse is worried about going out in the snow… Finally, to return to the Great War with which I have been quite preoccupied with in this blog over the years, there is the story of the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front, not repeated in subsequent years as far as I’m aware. Overall, not a lot from a lifetime of reading, although perhaps I’ve forgotten a few other mentions. Perhaps you can prompt me, dear reader…

The Name of the Rose – TV series

Well, I finally watched the last episode of the internationally-produced series of The Name of the Rose. I’m glad I made the effort to stick with it – I nearly gave up after two episodes – and yet it was a very flawed production.

What worked? We did get a very detailed picture of the awfulness of the Inquisition and how it worked, and the casting and acting of Bernardo Gui the Inquisitor was superb. I was chilled a couple of years ago when I toured the Palais des Papes in Avignon, and there high up on the wall in one of the huge rooms was inscribed ‘the Inquisitor Bernardo Gui used to sit here’. Generally the casting and acting was good: I wasn’t too enamoured of the young Adso of Melk, but William of Baskerville excellently played, far surpassing Sean Connery’s effort in the earlier film of the novel.

More attention was paid to the scope of the original novel, which of course is rather more easily done in an eight-part series than in a feature-length film.

And yet… The set of the abbey itself I found rather cheap and tacky. Much of the earlier film was shot in an around a well-known, real abbey (Kloster Eberbach) in Germany; this studio set failed to convince, and the library was particularly poor, I felt.

The screenplay was a very unbalanced version of the novel. And for such an intricate and carefully composed text as The Name of the Rose, I think that really matters. What spoiled things most for me was the way that, gratuitously, the Adso story was expanded, and the ‘romance’ with the heretic girl was developed in completely unconvincing ways, with the novice heading out into the countryside for secret assignments with her. Eco’s version in the novel is much briefer, and far more convincing as an integral part of the story and of Adso’s life: it’s a brief, one-off sexual encounter where he is seduced and experiences the pleasures of the flesh as a youth. That experience clearly marks his life; the girl is burnt as a witch and there is also a cruel message in that for him. The earlier film remains true to the novel; in the TV series there is a very long rigmarole involving another woman stalking the Inquisitor, and rescuing the seductress, and yet Adso just leaves her then… what? I’m afraid the producers just wanted there to be more female interest that Eco had not provided, so they invented it – badly.

Similarly, the labyrinth that is the library in the novel is an integral part of the plot and the detective work, as well as a metaphor; this was very much sidelined and then rushed through in the final hectic episode. And the whole matter of the nature of the mysterious book that monks would kill for is also sidelined, whereas it’s at the core of some of the key theological arguments that run through the book: did Christ ever laugh? Is laughter a necessary part of human existence? Again, a rushed and nodding gesture in the final episode only. I also felt that the detective work by William and Adso was rather underplayed, only allowed to intrude occasionally rather than developing in any connected way. Why did the producers think Eco named his protagonist William of Baskerville, for goodness’ sake?

Even the title of the novel itself, which Eco links into the scholasticism of the mediaeval era in which he sets the novel, is glossed over almost incomprehensibly in the final seconds of the series: you’d miss the allusion were you not familiar with the novel. And finally, the framing of the entire novel by the aged Adso as he nears the end of his earthly life is lost, given up, when that shift in the closing pages of the novel is so powerful in drawing all the strands of such a complex story together.

It’s a little trite to say that perhaps some stories cannot successfully be filmed, but, after two very different and imperfect versions, perhaps this has to be the verdict on Eco’s finest novel, and for me, one of the best ones of the last century.

Living the nightmare

Warning: politics ahead

Like most of my friends and acquaintances, we went to bed last night feeling very grim, and woke up to our worst nightmare. Today, I do not feel that this is my country. Mr Johnson can say all he likes about uniting the country, but the fact for me that is most salient is that only 47% of the electorate voted for Brexit parties, so I’m not sure how he plans to square the circle. And, as we say round here, I wouldn’t believe him if he told me today was Friday.

The most basic insanity about Britain is our prehistoric electoral system. And both major parties defend it: winner takes all. You get the chance to wreck or demolish everything your opponents spent years doing. That’s not a recipe for successful politics, or running a country. We had a chance, in a referendum (!) to change the system, and the main parties wrecked it.

Then we have a mass media which is two-thirds owned by foreign billionaires. Enough said. I don’t know of any other country which allows this.

For years, we have lived in a one-party state, with no real or effective opposition. The Labour party has been hijacked by a leftist cult more interested in ideology than cultivating and nurturing its natural base of supporters, and the result of that is clear today. Those manipulating the party thought it was better to plan for a socialist Jerusalem one day, than deal convincingly with today’s issues. There was no clear policy about the EU or Brexit, and that vacillation helped poison opinion. Even as we went into the election, Labour and the Lib Dems were more interested in biting each other than the real enemy.

What are we faced with now? One thing I can lay claim to, and that’s my years; today I think we are in a far worse place than 1979, when the Thatcher nightmare arrived. The country is utterly and irrevocably divided. We are about to give up membership of the largest trading bloc, and attempt to go it alone, or maybe become the 51^st state of the union. It has become fashionable to knock the 1970s. There were a lot of things wrong in that decade – I know, because that’s when I became an adult and first voted – but there were no food banks and no thousands sleeping on the streets every night. That is an appalling indictment of our society, and especially of all those who voted Conservative yesterday. Society was more caring of its less fortunate members in those days. And we weren’t fleeced left, right and centre by privatised companies owning the basic necessities of daily life like power, water and transport.

My generation wanted a better society. It has failed ignominiously, allowing inequality, poverty and racism to thrive. As for the future of the planet, do you think that will get a look-in during the mad, money-grubbing bonanza that will be unleashed as everyone tries to grab a bigger slice of the smaller post-Brexit cake? I try to find a bright side to look on, and the only one I can see is the younger generation today, who seem to have different ideas and different goals and commitments: I hope they are more successful than we were(n’t). But I have to end on a gloomy note: I fear for the future because I fear civil unrest and even violence lurk on the not-too-distant horizon. We are living in very dark times.

Richard Holloway: How to Read the Bible

   Here’s a radical approach to the Bible from a former Bishop of Edinburgh whose autobiography impressed me; it won’t be to everyone’s taste, and I’m not exactly sure I’d describe it as a ‘how to read’ guide either, but it was very thought-provoking. If you want something with more detailed and specific guidance, then I suggest The Thoughtful Guide to the Bible, by Roy Robinson.

Holloway outlines the various complexities of the text, especially of the New Testament and the questions about authenticity; he accepts the current areas of doubt, indeed finding no fault with the notion of God as a human creation to explain our existence, an idea which makes increasing sense to me, indeed which I find very helpful. The more I read, the more this man’s open-mindedness astonishes me. All thinking about God, he points out, is an unavoidably human process, so he sees the Bible as revealing things about the nature of humanity.

The particular issues he raises about the New Testament centre around the idea that a major enterprise of Christianity has been the inserting of ideas from a later perspective into the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament): the New Testament can thus be seen as prophecy historicised. He also notes in detail its impact on women.

In the end Holloway comes across as increasingly philosophical and less religious in his approach, more distant from any recognisable Christian church than I’d have expected. I like his global approach here, and found him particularly interesting when he explored the agendas of the different evangelists as they compiled their different versions of the Jesus story. I had previously been aware of this idea, but he clarifies and explains the differences and inconsistencies in their accounts. What is clear is that he can explain and accept these inconsistencies without seeing them as threatening or undermining the underlying message or teachings, and I’m with him here. Paul is also clearly contextualised, and Holloway provides a clear sequencing of the different New Testament texts as early Christianity developed: I’d never realised, for instance, that his letters pre-date the gospel narratives…

Short and eminently readable, I’d recommend this to open-minded believers and non-believers alike.

Without women the novel would die: discuss

This post has been prompted by this article, telling me that women buy 80% of all novels, and out-buy men in all categories of fiction except fantasy, science fiction and horror…

I was genuinely taken aback by this article, which is fascinating and full of food for thought, especially for this male reader, who felt challenged immediately. It’s not so much that the premise surprised me – I’ve always felt that women probably read more fiction than men, and in my own case know that I have read less fiction and more non-fiction as I’ve grown older. I’ve even written posts mentioning I’d realised this, and wondered why it should be.

The challenge to me from the article was, why do men read fiction? And I can only write from my own experience.

I’m reminded of something my dad often used to say in response to my saying I’d read something in a book: you can’t learn everything from books. And he was right. But I have always felt that there are so many lives to read and experience in novels: I only get to live this life of mine once, but I can experience so many more – admittedly fictional, but so what? – by reading novels. I can experience other people, other places, other times, other cultures: I can think about and reflect on what I’ve read. Vicarious experience, others’ wisdom through the creativity of so many writers, reflecting their lives and experiences of the world and life. It feels like an almost unimaginable richness

Reading fiction as a child showed me the vastness and variety of the world out there; fantasy such as the wonderful Lost Planet series encouraged my imagination to wander widely and introduced me to the feeling of being lost in the vastness of the cosmos. I have never lost this feeling, and would never want to be without it.

As a young man, novels like Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge introduced me to the idea of life as a spiritual quest or journey, and reading Hermann Hesse’s novels as a student deepened this experience. It has helped me make sense of my life, the people I have known, encounters I have had, and places I have been.

At university, reading English and French Literature, I obviously made acquaintance with a wide range of the classics. Such novels showed me the sense of their time, how people lived and loved, how people were different in other ages, as well as the ways they were the same; to see other lives unfolding at the same time as I felt mine was, gave me much food for thought and reflection. Sometimes it helped reading about how others wrestled with difficult emotions as I wrestled with mine. I find myself wondering now, whether a serious reader can ever untangle her/his own life from what they read…

As I grew older, acquiring a family and a career, and discovering just how much of life there was to be lived, I suppose it was inevitable that my reading would head along more specific tracks. As I’m half-Polish, I’ve clearly never felt completely English, and I ended up reading a great deal of literature from Eastern Europe in a quest to understand what had happened to my family and why, and to see how they had been shaped by experiences which, thankfully, I was never to undergo. Realising that my existence had to a considerable extent been shaped by war, I read widely in the literature of war and came to understand how deep and wide an effect it has had on us as a species, and how we are perhaps doomed never to escape the cycle of violence…

I have remarked else where in a number of posts how in my later years I have drifted away from fiction. It feels at the moment that I’ve lived a good proportion of my life, and perhaps fiction no longer has much to show me, although even as I write those words I can see how unsatisfactory a response that is. But my exploration of the world through the literature of travel has been very enjoyable as I visit places I will never physically get to, in the company of other travellers and explorers.

To come back to the original premise: why do men read fiction? This man has read to widen my experience of life and emotions, to feel the feelings of others – admittedly fictional characters – this man has read because I cannot imagine a life without reading.

Ten years’ blogging

Looking at the data that WordPress offers me, I realise that I’ve been running this blog for getting on for ten years, which feels like a bit of an achievement, and perhaps time to take stock, as well.

There are well over 900 posts, and I have about 350 followers, although no way of knowing how many of you drop by regularly or read every post. This last year, a lot more visitors seem to have been digging back into the archives and looking up specific posts. And I don’t know why certain posts are so popular – on Carol Ann Duffy’s The Wound in Time, her poem commemorating the centenary of the 1918 armistice, on John Danby’s Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature. Ismail Kadare and Josef Skvorecky are popular this year; Theodore Kroger’s The Forgotten Village is a perennial favourite post. I’d really like to know more about why people visit and what they think, but you seem to be pretty reluctant to post comments, so I guess I’ll never know… But it is quite satisfying to think that people are stopping by regularly to read what I have to say.

As I blog about every book I read, the activity of blogging has affected the way I read and think about what I read, in a positive way for me. Sometimes I wonder if it also affects what I choose to read, but nothing yet has shown me that this is the case: I read what I want to read, one thing leads to another, and each year is punctuated by certain books I’ve looked forward to. This year’s have been Margaret Atwood’s The Testimonies and Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth.

In the past I was also reflecting quite a lot on my experiences as a teacher, and the teaching of English, but as I’m now in my ninth year of retirement, there’s rather less of that. I’m still in touch with some of my former students, and pleased that they remember me, and often say appreciative things about the past. I’m aware that the nature of the teaching profession, and what teachers are expected to do, has changed quite radically in this country in recent years, even though the corpus of English literature hasn’t; to me, this means that a good deal of my experience is no longer relevant today. However, I’ve spent some of my time writing some study guides (on The Handmaid’s Tale, Antony & Cleopatra, and Journey’s End – if you’re interested in these you will need to visit the ZigZag website) which I’ve enjoyed doing, and which has helped to keep my brain in gear and use some of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom (?) of the years.

I’ve occasionally also written political posts, and sometimes have felt like writing more, but have not done so. I want to keep this a literature and reading blog above all else, and often think there’s too much political pontificating about without someone else adding more…

I shall keep going with this as long as I’m able to, as it currently feels like a useful discipline. There are dozens more books piled up waiting to be read, and somewhere I think I’ve accepted that I’ll never get to the end of them…

Thank you to all my readers, whoever and wherever you are. And do post a comment to let me know what you like or don’t like, what you agree or disagree with.