On learning to read

The eldest of our grandchildren is now at school, and learning to read. Given that reading is such an important part of my life, and always has been, I find it strange that I can recall very little about how I actually learned to read. I remember nothing at all from before I went to school as a rising five; ours was a poor household and there was no money for books. However, when in Class 1 Miss Marvell began the process of teaching us, I do recall that it seemed quite straightforward to me, so I must have been ready or prepared in some way for it.

The letters of the alphabet were on charts high up on the classroom walls, and I remember our having to chant the sounds aloud, in unison. Shortly after this came a series of flashcards with ‘sentences’ on them, which again we were required to chant; I remember thinking they were daft at the time. The one that has stuck in my mind for sixty-odd years said, “Mother, mother, see Kitty!” and I can remember thinking, “Who on earth would speak like that?”

Eventually there were readers – the Janet and John series, I think, that we shared one between two, and took in turns to read a sentence aloud. Again I recall thinking that I wanted to read a lot more than one sentence because this new skill was so exciting and I could do it, and also feeling impatient with those who couldn’t master the words, or stumbled over them. At the same time as acquiring this new skill, we were also learning how to write, beginning with individual miniature blackboards (as chalkboards were then called) and graduating to pencil and paper as soon as our fine motor skills were good enough. Here I remember being cross about having to use the pencil and paper, because I quite liked the business with the chalk…

Yet I was never conscious that I was learning to read and write; I hoovered it all up, along with the excitement and the possibilities it opened up. I have no recollection of taking readers home from school and practising with my parents; I don’t think such things happened in those days – school was school, home was home, and quite honestly, my parents were too busy running a home and family.

When I think about it now, I realise that the ability to master and operate with text was crucial to schooling in those days, for everything came from printed textbooks, with a very few black and white line illustrations. In other words, if you couldn’t read, you were seriously stuck. I remember that in the second class, those of us who could read competently were paired up with those who needed practice, to help them and hear them read. Again, uncharitably, I found this tedious, as at the age of going on six I couldn’t see how anyone couldn’t understand those letters and words…

Still no books at home. I must have been coming up to seven when my mother realised that she could sign me up to the children’s section of Stamford Public Library, and I can truly say that from that moment I never looked back. I read anything and everything, not quite indiscriminately, but pretty promiscuously. I can remember particularly the Young Traveller series, which probably sparked off that bug – two children in a nice, white middle-class family who got taken off to lots of interesting countries and saw the sights, tried the food and learned about habits and customs: I wanted to be able to do that. I exhausted the possibilities of the children’s library by the age of twelve, at which point my mother went and soft-talked them into allowing me access to the ‘grownups’ library several years early…

There were also the small classroom libraries at school: when you had successfully completed a task, it was often easiest for the teacher to send you off to get a book to read until everyone else had finished, and the class could move on to the next thing together. Again, I hoovered up everything, and can remember being particularly interested in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, which I devoured large chunks of.

Finally, I also began to acquire some books of my own: my parents realised how much reading meant to me. I was thrilled when they bought me Winnie the Pooh, and overjoyed when Christmas and birthdays brought book tokens, with which I bought my first copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and also The Wind in the Willows. That last one I still have, a treasured item in my now vast library. And I know that there’s a certain snobbishness or superiority in saying this, but I cannot understand people who can, but do not read, and I have never understood how it’s possible to have a home without books…

What comes out of all this is my realisation of the incredibly liberating effect of education. I’m always very moved when I read about the lengths that some children in the Third World go to, in order to be able to get to school, and I appreciate my father’s determination that I should get a good education – he had four winters of school, 1922-26 and that was it…

Susanna Clarke: Piranesi

     Spoiler alert!

Well, in all honesty I should go back and amend this post – or not write about a year until it’s properly over, because this novel deserves an accolade. Read it in a day, and it stunned me, so utterly weird it was. Initially it reminded me of some of the drug-crazed ramblings I read during my hippy days, then reminded me of the utter weirdness of Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, finally reminded me of some of the best detective stories I’ve ever read.

Weird beyond belief, the tale of someone trapped or marooned in what seems at first a strange parallel universe modelled on the bizarre drawings of the eponymous Italian artist: at first I found myself wondering whether there was some complex allegory developing. A world with only two people in it. And the behaviour of the other (or the Other) was quite quickly not exactly what it seemed to be. A story that defied attempts to parse it from the outset.

Do the two characters have anything in common, do they share a goal? Is one misleading the other? Do they understand each other, have they a rapport or were they just thrown together? And why is the Other so much better equipped than the narrator?

Another weirdness: although the narrator/writer of the journals is named as a male character, I cannot fathom why I never shook off the very strong impression that the story was being told by a female.

What triggered the comparison with Ben Marcus was the initial impression that there was just enough commonality between my world and my language and those of the narrator for me to be able to make some vague sense of what was going on. Gradually, as the plot develops and ideas suggest themselves, the story begins to mutate into detective fiction, although that term fails to do justice to the tour-de-force of motivations, clues and evidence that Susanna Clarke weaves to deceive and delude. It turns in on itself, there are wheels within wheels, and then there are doors between universes à la Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials.

Incomprehensible things have been happening, and rightly do we wonder, along with the narrator, where our and her (!) sanity lies; the mind plays tricks – has mountains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins once said – and the gradual and painful unpicking by the narrator of what actually happened to him, aided by his meticulous and obsessively-indexed journals, and his coming finally to entertain the possibility of being rescued from the bizarre world which he has grown to know and love unfold beautifully, sweeps you along.

It’s a truly mind-blowing tale as it plays with your head all the while you are reading. It’s really a stunner. Unputdownable.

Colin Thubron: The Amur River

     A very welcome Christmas present was this latest book from travel veteran Colin Thubron, an arduous journey along the Amur/Heilongjiang river (and tributaries) which forms the disputed frontier between Russia and China. It was a little while before I registered that Thubron was in his eightieth year (!) when he made this lengthy trip: my admiration increased given the evident physical endurance he needed, and the injuries he sustained. And so there still are incredibly remote, unexplored and relatively dangerous places on the planet for intrepid travellers to explore, even though, as we learn, they are inhabited by peoples who have eked out their living there for centuries…

The joy of such a book is being in the company of someone who writes really well: his style is atmospheric, he is knowledgeable, the prose flows almost effortlessly, and Thubron knows how to not intrude, how not to make his narrative me-me-me-look-at me! His curiosity is evident throughout the book, and for me it’s the mark of a seasoned traveller the way he patiently reports casual conversations and encounters without any commentary or judgement, because he’s aware of his relative lack of knowledge. There is room for him to report a personal reaction or feeling to what he sees or hears, but that’s different, as well as separate from his account. This humility and respect on Thubron’s part remains, even if it’s clear or evident that what someone says is wrong, or sounds incorrect. Thus the horrors of the Stalin era and the collectivised past are allowed to stand and speak for themselves. And they do.

One thing which I learned from this journey and these places is the centuries-old distrust bordering on open dislike, even hatred that exists between Russia and China; I did not really know much about this, other than being aware of military skirmishes way back in 1969. We learn about various treaties which moved borders in various directions, the Chinese sense of injustice, and the different native peoples who had been innocently caught up in the greater powers tussles over their ancient homelands…

It comes across in the way he writes, that Thubron is aware that his picture of both Russia and China is necessarily limited: an outsider, try as they might, can never really know what it is like to live permanently as a citizen of another country, which is why careful impressions offered by a seasoned and thoughtful traveller are so interesting. He is open about what he does not see or cannot understand.

The overall picture which emerged for me was of Chinese dynamism and confidence in its new-found place in the world, contrasted with Russian entropy, and its searching for a sense of itself since the disappearance of the Soviet Union. There is much mutual resentment and dislike.

Necessary explanations and contextualisations are carefully woven in as we go along, and the one map is very useful and very carefully drawn and helpfully labelled, and most of the time was a good deal more use than my collection of atlases. I was, however, disappointed to find no photographs included in such a travelogue. It was hard to conceive of the utter remoteness of some of the places he writes about, and he made me want to return to Vladimir Arseniev’s account of the region. It’s a very good read.

2021: My year of reading

2021 has been a very conservative reading year. I’ve apparently only bought 20 books (I received another 3 for Christmas), but I have read over 90, so there’s been a lot of re-reading going on, and this has mainly been comfort reading to help me through the strange times we are living in. And the big clear-out also continues, as I get rid of books I know I’m not going to read or refer to again.

I spent quite a while revisiting Richard Brautigan’s novels, which have been in my library since my hippy days. They are light-hearted froth in a lot of ways, and yet some of them are very well-written, and I didn’t decide to get rid of all of them, but kept one or two just in case, as you do. The same is true of Hermann Hesse’s novels: I’ve now re-read all of these apart from The Glass Bead Game, which somehow I can’t face at the moment, even though some think it’s the best of all his works. I have a very vague recollection of it being a bit of a disappointment way back in the 1970s, too. But as I grow older I realise that Hesse’s fiction, and his ideas about the self and personality were pretty influential in my younger years in terms of how I saw myself and the world I lived in, and the connections between Hesse’s characters’ lives and the psychology of Carl Jung has been quite to the forefront when I’ve been re-reading the novels. Necessarily this led to a re-reading of some of Jung as well. In the end, I think the pandemic has caused me to undertake some fairly deep reflection on my entire life, and I know this has been the case for a good number of people.

There have been some new books this year, and a good number of them I read because they were choices of other members of my current book group. I’m a little surprised that I’ve stuck with the group – I like the people a lot – but at other times when I’ve been in a book group, I’ve dropped out fairly quickly because I didn’t like other people choosing my reading matter for me…

I’ve also realised that I read very little travel writing this year, which struck me as rather odd since my own opportunities for travel have been necessarily rather constrained for the past couple of years. I re-read a short and very lovely book Something of his Art, by Horatio Clare who travelled in the footsteps of my hero J S Bach, making the journey on foot from Arnstadt in Thuringia to Lübeck to hear the master organist Dietrich Buxtehude in the early eighteenth century. Clare records his impressions of the walk and reflects on the music and musician.

Discovery: I’ve wrestled with the Tao Te Ching a few times but not really got anywhere. My liking for Ursula Le Guin led me to get her version (ie version rather than translation, with plenty of her annotation and commentary) and I feel I’m now getting somewhere with it and something from it.

Blog report: more visits than ever this year, but this is largely due, as last year, to the number of what I imagine are students of the literature of the Great War reading up about various poems and poets as part of their studies. I’m grateful for their visits, and for everyone else who reads rather more widely in my meanderings through the world of literature, and I enjoy your comments and interactions.

Best SF: Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, although strictly speaking it’s an alternative history rather than science fiction. But a superb ‘what if?’

Best new novel: this has to be the (for me) long-awaited The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, which was a challenging but rewarding read and shows why she is a Nobel-class writer. Looking forward to more from her.

Best non-fiction: I found Adrift, by Amin Maalouf a fascinating account of the current state of the world, and how we got here. He’s a Lebanese writer, mainly a novelist but he has written about history and society before. He anchors so many of our current political problems in the Middle East and the effects that interfering outsiders have had over the past century as they struggled for control over the region and its resources. That’s oversimplifying a great deal, but is a very thought-provoking approach and one which matches the way I have thought about the world and seen it changing over my lifetime. The West’s appalling and cavalier treatment of Palestine is at the heart of so many problems and conflicts…

Best re-read(s): Amin Maalouf again, and Leo The African, his amazing re-creation of the true story of the Muslim boy from Spain at the time of the Reconquista, and his life, travels and adventures. Simply wonderful. Also Jean Giono’s Regain, about the resurrection of a remote village in France, the power of nature and those who live in harmony with it. Another book from my student days.

Next year’s plans: I want to continue with my reading of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I’ve also made a resolution to read/re-read more history. I shall continue to sort and tidy up my library, and attempt to buy no new books at all… I am allowing myself one exception, which will be the final volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, if it’s published. And lest you think I’m being extremist here, I will point out that I have several feet of as yet unread books on my shelves…

Amin Maalouf: Balthasar’s Odyssey

     I’ve just re-read another of my favourites by Amin Maalouf, and find myself wondering what it is I find so captivating in his writing. The socio-cultural and historical essays such as Adrift I find very interesting not just because his analyses largely concur with mine, but because they are far-sighted and take me out of my limited Western perspective and comfort-zone. With the novels, it’s different, and I’m beginning to wonder if this is to do with the nature of storytelling being different in other cultures; I’m not widely-enough read to judge at the moment.

I cam to Maalouf via Samarcand, then Leo the African, then this book. The settings are exotic, in the sense of a historical past, either in what we would have called mediaeval times, or else the Renaissance, and located in the Middle East, and the European parts of the Muslim world at those times. There are also usually characters from all three religions of the book, living together reasonably peacefully and tolerantly (within the parameters of their age), so perhaps Maalouf is looking back to a golden age in more ways than one, compared with our times. There is obviously an overlap – wishful thinking? – with his non-fiction.

This story is set in 1665-66, with overtones of the year of the Beast (666) and end times; there is a mysterious book which comes into and leaves the possession of the narrator repeatedly, which allegedly tells how to learn the mysterious hundredth name of God (according to the Qur’an there are ninety-nine) which will bring about transformation. Our narrator ranges the known world in obsessive pursuit of the book, which brings calamity in its wake; even in his possession and open in front of him, somehow it is impossible to read more than a few pages…

Maalouf’s characters in many of his novels are seekers, wanderers about the world; they are thinkers and they meet other kindred spirits on their travels and discuss religious and philosophical notions. Not only questing after truth, they are also on personal journeys of self-discovery and seeking happiness. Balthasar is 40 – significant, perhaps – seeking a book, love, a purpose for his future. I think this is one of the aspects of this novel, and Maalouf’s writing in general that appeals to me: there are real ideas and insights woven into the fiction.

There’s also something in the style of the story-telling: it’s first person, done through dated journal entries, so at one level there’s the potential for it to be fairly dull in terms of no suspense or changing viewpoints. But it’s not, it works in the sense that it’s the mind of his character that Maalouf wants us to know, and there is suspense via the gaps between the journal entries, and the unexpected changes of location of our narrator. It’s definitely not a Western novel as most of us might understand the term. In a way, it’s how some of the earliest English fiction was crafted; perhaps Maalouf is deliberately imitating something like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year?

Finally, there’s a kind of meta-fiction here too, a book about a book or books, such as we find in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in various of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, in Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind or in Gilbert Sinoué’s Livre de Saphir. There are books containing hidden or arcane knowledge for those who care to look or seek it, although perhaps not with the obsessiveness of the hero of this novel.

There’s a lot here. It’s not the average, evanescent stuff of much contemporary fiction – this is the third time I’ve read and enjoyed the novel, and it’s gone back on my shelves for the future.

50 years on…

For some reason, it came into my head that 2022 will mark half a century (!) since I did my A levels and left school. The sense of of the relentless passage of time was rather overwhelming, and I turned to reflecting on my world of so long ago. A Catholic boarding school; no sense of health and safety or safeguarding as we know them nowadays. From the naivety of the priests who ran it, a great sense of freedom in those heady days of the late sixties and early seventies. Much discovery of music, sexuality, astonishing films on TV… laying the foundations for my student days…

And, from the good teachers there, the inspirational ones, the push to be curious, explore the world of knowledge, art and literature. An amazing French teacher, years ahead of his time, who actually concentrated on getting us to speak the language, an English teacher who allowed and encouraged us to read anything and everything, a classics teacher who gave me a lifelong love of Latin and things and places Roman. No chance of becoming a scientist: no-one to teach Maths or sciences beyond O level. Was I bothered? Only much later on did I realise what roads had never been open to me, and by then any regret was pointless, futile: I was already me.

What remains today is the abiding feeling that learning is a lifelong activity, and that humans have a developed brain and a sense of reasoning for a deliberate purpose; yes, the priests’ message was laced with religious arguments, but for me the precepts are good in a secular world too. Since I left school all those years ago, at various points in my life I have chosen to go and learn German, Italian, Spanish, Yoga, and I have taught myself the art of bread-making and learned a lot about IT. From the relatively narrow field of my A level studies, my reading has broadened out in many directions…

Perhaps such attitudes meant that it was inevitable I would become a teacher myself… I don’t know. But I do hope I passed on some of that curiosity to those I taught.

I’m conscious of how much easier life generally, and schooling in particular, was in those long-ago days. You learned what you needed to learn for the exams, practised writing essays and sat the exams. No coursework, no continuous assessment, no relentless data-based pressure to make progress, and thereby enhance the school’s results and marketability. I have no memories of stress; perhaps I was lucky – I worked out how to be organised and get things done, and those habits have stood me in good stead.

Regrets? As I’ve aged, I’ve been aware of having missed out on sport and music. Back then, if you were keen and already capable, then games teachers were interested in you and encouraged you; if, like me, you knew nothing and couldn’t play, they were completely uninterested in helping or teaching you; you were bored, ignored, shivering and freezing on the edge of the field, and your lifetime loathing of sport grew early and long. With similar friends, I learned the joys of walking and rambling; that’s it for my physical activity. Music was the same: I now wish I could play an instrument, but there was never the opportunity. My voice broke early, so I was forbidden to sing lest I put others off. Just in case anyone is envious of the simplicity and freedom of those long-gone schooldays, there were those downsides, too.

I liked school. My father, who had only four winters’ worth of Polish rural schooling to his credit, encouraged me in my learning journey and I’ve never forgotten that. Education was the gateway to the world and to possibilities.

Wordery just lost a customer…

I was happy when the online bookseller Wordery emerged a few years back, as I’ve always sought alternatives to the behemoth that is Amazon. They offered decent prices, though their deliveries always took a while longer. They have now lost me as a customer, for very poor customer service and penny-pinching.

How many of you read a book as soon as you’ve bought it? Most of the time I do, but by no means always. More importantly, if you aren’t going to read a book straight away, do you carefully examine every page for possible defects before it rests on your shelves? Because it seems that’s what Wordery expects you to do, so that you can take advantage of its “generous” three-month period for complaints, replacements and refunds… Sale of Goods Act? Merchantable quality?

So, my gripe is about one of the beautifully presented Everyman’s Library hardbacks, Selected Writings of Alexander von Humboldt, which weighs in at 800 pages. I bought it a couple of years back, and have only just begun reading it.

No, I hadn’t checked every page. So when it suddenly repeated a 32-page sequence of pages, and then omitted the next 32-page section, I realised I had a useless book on my hands. No sympathy from customer service at Wordery. Too long had gone by. Basically a p*** off and die response; no reply to a second e-mail, or from a director of the company to whom I also complained.

Now, I’m not going to cry about it, but a book isn’t the kind of thing where you’re immediately going to detect a flaw which renders it useless. It’s not like a garment with a hole, or an electronic device which won’t function. And I’ll mention a story from about 20 years ago. Then, I’d bought a heavyweight academic tome on religious history from a secondhand bookshop. If I’d bought it new, it would have been £25 or more. And that turned out to have a missing signature (section of printed pages). I enquired of the publisher whether there was any way they might be able to supply me with the text of the missing pages, pointing out I’d bought a used copy. And was genuinely astounded when the reply basically said, ‘Nonsense. Send your address and we’ll replace the book.’ And they did.

Ah well, caveat emptor, as they say. And I shall. No more of my money to Wordery, who actually might have stood to make rather more out of me next year, when Amazon rejects my Visa card in its spat with the banking world. The whole business leaves a rather nasty taste in my mouth.

Rant over, back to reading.

Norton Juster: The Phantom Tollbooth

     A minor children’s classic about words and numbers; I was astonished to see it was 40 years since I bought this, which explained why it is falling to pieces, and it’s my second copy. I think we must have discovered it in my hippy days at university. Recalling enjoying reading it with a small boy I knew many years ago, I wondered how it might go down with my grandson who is very interested in numbers…

It’s a good and quite fast-paced read about a young boy who is bored all the time, and who finds himself taken on a weird trip to imaginary worlds… there’s as much, if not more, to appeal to adults as to children here, indeed a fair deal will pass today’s children by, I think, since we live in a very different age now. I was thinking about age, and while the plot might conceivably appeal to a seven year-old (so a while to wait for my grandson to grow older) a lot of the language and the concepts are rather more advanced than that. This is a shame, because the premise behind the book, which is to be observant, to notice things and to think about them (ie be a curious child) is an excellent one.

Another book which times have passed by, perhaps? Or another sign that time has passed me by? It is a good read, though.

Charles Nicholl: The Lodger

     A batch of legal papers from the early 17^th century, in which Shakespeare is questioned in a case about his landlord’s failure to pay his daughter’s marriage portion, is the premise for this rather tenuous book. True, it places the dramatist as a lodger in a particular house in London for a few years, but in factual terms, that’s it really.

Whilst it’s good (and harmless enough) for people to continue research after four centuries, there’s not an awful lot that’s going to be uncovered now that will cast any definite new light on Shakespeare’s life and career. What is possible is an awful lot of knitting together of evidence and threads into various tapestries of speculation and deduction that fill many pages. Sometimes there is interesting contextual detail and background, but nothing here that added to James Shapiro’s books 1599 and 1606 a few years back. Plenty of deduced geographical, historical and social trivia that, sadly, is presented in a rather dull, oddly disengaged style.

What did I learn? That there were similar issues then as now about immigration, and economic migrants, a similar black economy, a similar English resentment of foreigners taking jobs, not integrating into our country… Shakespeare lodged in a house of foreigners (French Huguenots) and there was a mildly interesting but rather cursory chapter on aliens in his plays, how he portrayed them and developed their characters.

The real issue with this book is that there isn’t enough material, particularly directly connected with Shakespeare. It’s heavily padded out with notes and also many pages of legal transcript of the 17^th century court case. Disappointing, and while I won’t go quite as far as to say a waste of my time, you can safely pass on this one.

Roy Robinson: The Thoughtful Guide to the Bible

     Here is a very carefully written and very thoughtful book, written by a minister in the United Reformed Church. So, a believer, and possibly with an axe to grind. But no. He clearly and trenchantly takes issue throughout the book with any kind of fundamentalist approach to the scriptures. He explains carefully and exemplifies his points, considering the history of the Bible, manuscripts, translation, the need for textual criticism, the traditions of Jews and Christians… and, at the end of it all, the scriptures survive, as they would.

He shows us the different target audiences and purposes of different books in both old and new testaments, and offers an excellent and detailed synopsis of all the research done over many years.

You can either be a fundamentalist who says everything is the word of God so unchangeable and to be obeyed, ignoring all the textual history and context of writings up to 2,500 or more years old, or a reader, perhaps believer, who realises that such a position is illogical and impossible, and that a different approach is therefore needed. What is the importance of the writings, what is the real essence or kernel of meaning? Does a modern approach undervalue and undermine it? Robertson’s answer is clear; his belief survives his microscopic examination.

I came to realise that, in the end a book like this is necessary in our times, an age where reason, logic and science present strong challenges to religious faith, although this is not really comparing like with like. But through a book like this, the messages which come from the teachings and example of the man Jesus can retain their significance for many more people today.

My only criticism of the book, really, is of the poor editing and proof-reading which did jar quite frequently during my re-reading of an otherwise very helpful book.