Initial Conditions

Somehow, since I started saying I was going to read more books, I have more books left to read than when I started. Much of this is because I had omitted some other books I’d found in my shelf, but also because I’d received some as gifts and bought some for some reason, despite saying I wouldn’t.

Anyway, from my last list, I read four of the eleven books: Exile & the Kingdom; Live & Let Die/Moonraker; The Case for Christ; and Tor! The Story of German Football (which disappointingly ended with England beating Germany 5-1, and no mention of the 2002 World Cup final or the 2006 World Cup held in Germany. But then it’s been sitting on my shelf for seven years, so I can’t really complain).

I have hence gained 8 books: two small ones by Kirkegaard; Plato’s Republic; Ovid’s metamorphoses (a throwback to the old GCSE Latin days); Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; The Damned United by David Peace; Sir Jackie Stewart’s autobiography; and a football stats book called Why England Lose (which I assure you is not just a diatribe by an angry Scotsman). Here’s a picture of all the books.

Lots of books...

Not sure I’ll get through this by the end of next year (never mind this), but we’ll see how it goes. And yes, I do like 3 for 2 offers!

I was recently sent a link to the website of the Latin Course we did in school. I’d forgotten about this story, which I will reproduce  for you now (in English), the end of which is brilliant (Quintus is Caecilius’ son, Grumio his cook and Metella his wife):

Caecilius is walking to the harbour. Caecilius is looking around the harbour. The banker sees a Syrian ship and walks towards the ship. Syphax is standing near the ship.

“Hello, Syphax!”, shouts the banker. Syphax is a slave-dealer. Syphax greets Caecilius.

Ceacilius seeks a slave. Syphax smiles. Look! Syphax has a great slave. Caecilius looks at the slave. The banker is not happy. The banker does not buy the slave.

“Wine!” shouts Syphax. The slave-girl brings wine to Caecilius. The banker drinks the wine. Caecilius looks at the slave-girl. The slave-girl is beautiful. The slave-girl smiles. The slave-girl pleases Caecilius. The slave-dealer also smiles.

“Melissa cooks an excellent dinner,” says the slave-dealer. “Melissa speaks Latin. Melissa is educated and pretty. Melissa…”

“Enough, enough!”, shouts Caecilius.  Caecilius buys Melissa and returns to the house. Melissa pleases Grumio. Melissa pleases Quintus. Alas! Melissa does not please Metella.

If any women are upset by such misogyny, you’ll be pleased to hear Caecilius ends up squashed by a wall after Vesuvius erupts. Grumio also dies, and Quintus ends up in Britain, so they all get their just desserts.

(If you’re wondering why everything is in the present tense, it’s because you don’t learn past tense until unit VI)

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading books as part of my “finish my unread book collection” challenge (which really needs a catchier name. Suggestions?) and I thought I’d share my thoughts on them.

The first book in my arduous journey was Albert Camus’ Exile and the Kingdom, a disparate collection of short stories laden with Camus’ own brand of Existensialism and Absurdism. Highlights, for me, of the collection were The Guest, which can also be translated The Host, a story of a man who has a civic duty to do, but which will mean he will have to take sides in the Algerian question (which was prevalent at the time), and Jonas, which describes a painter who becomes obsessed with his work.

I’ve been interested in Camus’ works ever since I picked up L’Etranger. Many of the themes there are present here, but none of the stories is really as captivating, especially The Renegade, which I found extremely confusing. One thing the Camus excels at is the sensory description of scenes, especially at the climax of The Adulterous Woman, and this helps you immerse yourself in the story somewhat. However, I would recommend this only if you wanted to complete your collection of Camus.

Then I read a James Bond triple bill: Casino Royale/ Live & Let Die /Moonraker, which, I will confess, I bought when there was a lot of Quantum of Solace hype.

These books, however, are vastly superior to that film, and I wish I’d read them before seeing the various film versions, which pale in comparison.

Ian Fleming was an extremely talented writer, and his dscription of Bond and his adventures is an absolute joy to read. Of the three books, the best was probably Casino Royale, where the tension of the Baccarat game shines through as though you were there. The sexual tension between Bond and Vesper is almost tangible and the ending is as tragic as it is brilliant. The torture scene seems even more painful than in the film version, too.

Live & Let Die is also a pretty good adventure, which sees Bond track down “Mr Big” a very influential figure in the African-American community. There’s a bit of racism, but if you don’t mind that, you can enjoy a surprise on a train and Bond getting bored in a traditional American diner in Florida. Again there’s a rather gory and descriptive torture element, but that’s not really a problem, for me anyway.

Moonraker is probably the weakest of the three and is nothing like the film (except that the baddie has the same name). Indeed, Bond doesn’t even leave the home counties! Unfortunately, there’s a lengthy description of a game of Bridge (which I don’t understand) and it plods a bit before the climax (which would never make it into a film version because it isn’t happy enough), but it’s still a bit of good old fashioned escapism.

Overall, it’s a good trilogy, and there’s a running gag about Bond’s resemblance to an actor from the era to look out for. Failing that, you can enjoy the amount of time Bond smokes, and his observations on the female secretaries and the Bond girls are quite amusing, and if you like cars, he likes to talk about them in a lot of detail too. You’ll enjoy these books if you like the films, but if you don’t like the films, you might enjoy them, as I can’t help but feel the films were somewhat underdone in comparison.

Apologies, for this is a bit late.

Last year, I put up a list of books that I wanted to read in 2008. I didn’t succeed. Here is the list, and beside them I have written whether or not I read them:

“The Trial” by Franz Kafka: read, but didn’t really get

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain : Didn’t read

“Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis: read and enjoyed

“The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel: didn’t read

“Eureka! The Birth of Science” by Andrew Gregory: read and enjoyed

“Inside Out” by Larry Crabb: didn’t read and didn’t even buy or borrow it

“God’s Undertaker” by John Lennox: nope

So even the meagre number of books I intended to read didn’t get read, often because I read other books in the course of the year that weren’t on the list.

So, I would like to present my 2009 list. I’m going to try and avoid buying any others!

Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus

Live & Let Die/ Moonraker double bill by Ian Fleming

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

From Russia with Love /Dr. No/ Goldfinger triple bill by Ian Fleming

The First Man by Albert Camus

God’s Undertaker by John Lennox

Tor! The Story of German Football (I won’t try and spell the author’s name!)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (a big one to finish!)

This amounts to a wopping 3500 pages of literature to be read! As such, I think it highly unlikely that I’ll get these done before I come to write again next year, but it’s a good thing to aim for, no?

Also, if any of these are stinkers, please tell me so I can omit it!

3500 pages. Best get started (Bible not included in this project, though I shall be reading that as well)!

Sometimes it’s good to go back and rediscover the books you read at school. Why recently I re-read “Lord of the Flies” (flashback to prep school days) and loved it and “L’étranger” and “La Symphonie Pastorale” remain in my all-time favourites list.

It’s good because English ruins books for you. I hated Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men, because I associated them with the chore of finding similes and metaphors and discussing how the writer made the passage humourous (although that didn’t occur in either of those books). Being forgiving, however, I decided to give them both a re-read recently, and this post concerns Of Mice and Men.

Free from the shackles of “If I don’t read this, I’ll fail”, I discovered that Of Mice and Men is a very good work indeed, and were it not for my enormous book backlog, I would seriously consider expanding the “Steinbeck” section of my bookshelf. For those of you not familiar with the plot, it concerns two Californian wanderers, looking to make some money by doing ranchwork here and there, the moving on, in the hope that they can one day get a ranch of their own.

George is the sensible, level-headed fella who takes care of Lennie, a man whose stature and brute force bely his child-like, one track mind nature. Because all poor Lennie wants to do is stay and look after rabbits and stroke other soft, furry things, a habit which leads to the pair becoming travellers in the first place…. and eventually leads them into more trouble later on.

The other characters, with the possible exception of Candy and Crooks (often referred to as the n-word, but I will do no such naughty thing here) are a bit one-dimensional (or seem to be there for a sole reason) but that doesn’t detract from the main point of the story, the plight of the two men trying to find their place in the universe.

Unfortunately, my reviewing skills (?) don’t do his book justice, and if you haven’t read it, please do.

Next up for me is some Camus, though exactly what I have yet to decide. The list of remaining books is:

The myth of Sisyphus by Camus

Exile and the Kingdom by Camus

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel

God’s Undertaker by John Lennox

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

As yet untitled PhD thesis by Andrew Stothers (I know, I made this joke already)

Unfortunately I decided to name another post I wrote as “the trial” so I kind of burnt some bridges there. But anyway, on the train to Brum I managed to finish Kafka’s most well-known opus (tragically only the first from my list of things to read- it’s taken me three months to read one 200 page book, it doesn’t bode well for the rest).

Anyway here’s a small precis- an ordinary bank worker wakes up one day to find that he is being arrested for an unknown crime and is thrown into a world of paranoia and bureaucracy is about how I can best sum it up.

I have to say I was very disappointed by it, not because it wasn’t a classic, but more because it wasn’t really how I expected it. The problem I had was that there didn’t seem to be enough “action”, and this is none-better realised than when K., the main character, is speaking to a painter who can help him out and (later) a priest, both of whom seemed to talk at length and saying the same things over again without really keeping my interest. But that might be due to my being easily distracted by scenery and “train managers” (why aren’t they called conductors any more?) more than the book itself being uninteresting. It required some serious concentration and memory recall at times, and I guess this is why it’s loved by academics. The fact that some parts were unfinished doesn’t really help.

It has some plus points in that it is funny in an odd sort of way and the books themes are well put forward, and probably would be an entertaining read with some tea and a quiet room. What is most satisfying, however, is the finishing of the first of my pile of books and I look forward to something less cerebral in future.

This year, I have every intention of going through the massive backlog of books that currently lives on my shelf (see picture) . So, by the end of this year, I hope to have under my belt:

“The Trial” by Franz Kafka (I don’t actually have this book, but I want to read it- if you have it, please let me know, english version preferred as I can’t speak german especially well)

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

“Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis

“The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel

“Eureka! The Birth of Science” by Andrew Gregory

and some other books I don’t have (if any of you have them I will take it off your hands for a bit)

“Inside Out” by Larry Crabb

“God’s Undertaker” by John Lennox

“As-yet-untitled PhD thesis” by Andrew Stothers . Oh look, is that a pig flying out the window…

So as I read these I might review them up here. Be mildly excited.