I’m typing this post on my new, incredibly sexy laptop. Thank the gods for credit cards. It has several things going for it. First, it loads up and shuts down every single time I ask it to (and only when I ask it to). Second, it doesn’t flip to the blue-screen-of-death when I run more than one programme at once. Third, the s and e keys work. Fourth, the screen doesn’t curve out because I once melted the case with a desk lamp. Fifth, it doesn’t rev like the engine of a speedboat when the fan comes on (which it does very rarely). Sixth, it has the Windows Vista version of Minesweeper which I am not, I repeat not, in the least addicted to. The only problem with it thus far is that it isn’t connected to the internet. Let us not speak of the hours of frustration Esther and I spent hunched over our new wireless router – which was very cheap and, thus, predictably crappy. Safe to say I should have known the limits of my IT skills. I should have spent another £20 and bought a box that you didn’t have to set up manually, with only a pamphlet in Chinese for guidance. BT (my ISP) to the rescue... I called them up in a rage and they placated me by offering me a free and fool-proof wireless hub in exchange for reducing the cost of my broadband package (I’m sure the call centre guy wasn’t supposed to do this – thank you!). Unfortunately the new router doesn’t arrive until Friday 26th, and until then I’m still using the old beast for essential online business and the pretty, new baby for everything else.
I’d like to think that I’d have written a dozen Alexandria posts in September if it weren’t for the death throes of my old computer. But I likely wouldn’t have. The kinds of posts I tend to write – the long review posts – take time and energy and, more than that, demand that I read books. And the truth is that I haven’t been doing a lot of reading lately. I’ve spent a lot of time yearning after reading; I’ve been a fasting bibliophile, snatching morsels of words here and there but rarely spending more than 10-15 minutes in front of a book (for pleasure) through the whole month. It’s painful, I know. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long reading drought.
I’ve been making up for it by buying books left, right and centre, supplemented by freebies from the publishers. Because if you can’t read, you can at least fantasise about the possibilities of what to read next and surround yourself in new promising tomes. The focus of my fantasies? Non-fiction. Perhaps this is because non-fiction works better in small snippets than fiction does? I’ve been scouring the review pages for new releases, and been rewarded. Recent purchases include:
· The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise – I tried to tell myself this was relevant to my teaching prep since it is, technically, a work of local history. But really my interest was piqued by the period, which I always find comforting as winter approaches.
· Leviathan, Or The Whale by Philip Hoare – Have you seen a copy of this book? To pick it up is to fall in love with it. It is one of those beautiful dumpy hardbacks, interspersed with black and white illustrations; also, one of those delicious titles that defies categorisation. It is about whales, or the idea of whales, but is it a work of history? Or literary criticism? Memoir? Nature writing? Or travelogue?
· Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill – You may remember how I loved Hill’s magisterial debut, God’s Architect, a biography of Augustus Pugin. How could I resist her second book? Again, it is something of an oddity, being both about Stonehenge and not. Really it is a history of ideas about, and attitudes towards, the world’s most famous Neolithic monument. As such, it is more interested in what we have made of Stonehenge, rather than what it actually is.
· The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift – Again, one of those dumpy hardbacks. (Note to publishers: I really do find them irresistable, and I’m sure I can’t be the only one. I’d probably buy a book about fighter planes if you packaged it with the right dimensions.) And, again, the content is unquantifiable. The dust jacket goes for the mystic sell: This is a book about time and the garden: all gardens but also a particular one. In other words: Katherine Swift moved to the dower house at Morville in 1988 and set about recreating its lost garden, interweaving the past and present through nature. Which sounds lovely on its own but it’s the structure of the book that sold it to me. It takes the form of a medieval Book of Hours - recalling the monastic past of the dower house – each chapter being named after one of the Hours of Divine Service, linked to both a time of day, to a month and to a season. The opening page was the clincher:
Some people watch birds. I watch clouds. Sometimes it’s the same thing, as when the buzzards soar on a rising thermal above the garden, or the swifts and house martins chase high-flying gnats on a summer’s day. But mostly it’s just clouds I watch: the hard edge of a retreating cumulonimbus, the thin veil of a cirrostratus as a warm front comes in, the halo of rainbow-coloured ice crystals around the moon in a mackerel sky. In winter the clouds run down from the north and the east, from the open land beyond the garden; in spring they come bowling up the valley from the south-west, their shadows scudding across the hill side, the fields darkening and brightening with their passage.
· Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story by Peter Marshall – This comes courtesy of Oxford University Press – thank you! – and hot on the heels of a tantalising review in the LRB. It sounds like a fascinating experiment in narrative history, taking two apparently disparate events – the sighting of a ghost in the English coastal town of Minehead in 1636 and the hanging of an Irish bishop for sodomy in 1640 – and connecting them through a historiographical sleight of hand.
Of course I haven’t abandoned fiction altogether... I couldn’t resist buying Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Home, a companion piece to Gilead, which came out last Thursday (I literally snatched my copy out of the hands of girl shelving them), or accepting a review copy of a new collection of Ghost Stories from Everyman (due out at the end of October). The selection is broad, but decidedly ‘literary’, including Henry James’ ‘The Friends of the Friends’ and Edith Wharton’s ‘The Looking Glass’, plus stories by Nabokov, Welty, Borges and Guy de Maupassant. I’m looking forward to dipping in and out of it over the next month.
And, hopefully, I’ll have more time for both reading and posting as September turns to October. I’ll have handed in my latest Archives assignment for one thing, and will have finished my teaching prep for another. And I’ll have a reliable computer too. Amen to that.
~~Victoria~~