A blot on the landscape?

Leaving behind a world of class divisions and clever caricatures, we crossed the boundary of the worlds and entered the fantasy land of Inkheart. Cosimo and I both like a lot of children’s fantasy – but not this one. In contrast to our previous read, this book was finished, but perhaps shouldn’t have been. The plot was clever, but the execution poor. The idea is that a writer’s stories become real and his characters turn on him, with both travelling back and forth between the real world and the story world. It should have been fun, but the characters were so uncompelling that, in contrast to Gogol, they left you wanting to put the book down rather than pick it up. The dangers never felt at all real, and the main villain never provided the menace (or the intelligence) that the role required. The language was also turgid, and we waded through it to the end and then thankfully turned our attention to The Hall of a Thousand Columns.

In quest of Russian souls

This blog has already come back from the brink once, now it’s had a near death experience – but it’s undergoing a resurrection. Fortunately our reading has not been going as slowly as our blogging – but we’re now testing out a new rule: not to start a new book until we’ve blogged the last one. We’ll see how that goes.

Taking up from where we left off for now, we left the wilds of the Deep South and crossed to rural Russia, where we followed Chichikov, a 19^th Century Russian social climber in his pursuit of serfs – dead serfs to be precise. Now I do not have a Russian soul and have rarely truly enjoyed (though I have appreciated) any Russian book. Gogol’s Dead Souls was an exception. The book was clever, funny and an easy read – although it also contains some quite sharp social commentary. The knowledge that it was never completed had put me off reading it for years by, but this is actually largely irrelevant. The fundamental premise of the book is both brilliant and bizarre. It centres on Chichikov’s efforts to exploit a buerocratic loophole, enabling him to build up his estate and thereby his social status by acquiring dead serfs. It is more character than plot driven however and what makes it memorable and amusing are the larger than life characters that Chichikov encounters – and this is the reason that it doesn’t really matter that the book was never finished. Also, his message about the flaws of the stratified Russian society of his time comes through loud and clear.

A return to reading

Well it has been so long since I updated this that I thought I would start again simply with a list of the books Cosimo and I have read over the last couple of years and then just give a few ponderings to get this voyage on the road again (if indeed you do voyage by road) .

Cakes and Ale (W. Somerset Maugham)

The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Leave it to Psmith (P.G. Wodehouse)

Hard Times (Andy McNab ... ok, maybe not. Charles Dickens, perhaps)

Travels with a Tangerine (Tim Mackintosh-Smith)

Confessions of St. Augustine (Augustine of Hippo)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Dead Souls (Gogol)

Inkheart (Cornelia Funke)

Hall of a Thousand Columns (Tim Mackintosh-Smith)

Songlines (Bruce Chatwin)

Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)

The Riders (Tim Winton)

The Last of the Wine (Mary Renault)

Resurrection (Leo Tolstoy)

The Once and Future King (T.H. White)

Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italo Calvino)

Right when last seen about a year ago, this blog was busy dealing with Leave it to Psmith which was frothy, fun and a bit of a relief, but then we got back to misery again with Hard Times. Ok it wasn't all that miserable - there were definite fun sections but the title has to give you some kind of clue that it wasn't all cheer and good humour. The opening though is brilliant - anybody who relies too much on facts should be forced to read it. I must admit though that I find the beginning the much more memorable than the end which has rather receded in both Cosimo and my minds.

From there we decided to fast-forward through the centuries again and actually go travelling, seeing the world through the pages of a book in Travels with a Tangerine. Our time-travelling took us in the steps of a 21st Century writer, tracking the 14th Century Arab, Ibn Battutah throughout North Africa. This was without a doubt one of the highlight books of all that we have read - by turns fascinating, informative and hilarious. I must admit, it left me with no desire to sample the Morrocan delicacy of rotten fish (you could almost smell it from the pages).

Shortly after this, our voyage ran fairly well smack into a brick wall with the Confessions of Augustine. I am sure it is a great book - but it is not one for casual reading. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I have followed a certain man of Hippo through pages of his life. Unfortunately, I never made it to the end. I hope that God had more patience than I.

Abandoning Augustine still in North Africa, I hopped across the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The sheer exuberance and celebration of the world and what it offered, of mischief and adventure, but also of humanity in everyone makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a wonderful book (and a big relief after Confessions). OK I don't think I shall ever find Tom Sawyer anything but profoundly annoying but he is still in many ways a real person. I had been rather avoiding this book for no good reason for years and I loved it. The dialect that Twain captures is also so clever. I don't think I have ever fully appreciated his skill as a writer before.

Well that has brought our travels a bit further, I shall leave you with Huck on the banks of the Mississippi for a brief (hopefully) pause before we head to Russia in the next stage of our voyage.

A year in books - or at least the beginning thereof

Ok well the title is slightly inaccurate but it gives the gist. A little over a year ago (more like a year and a half) a friend and I decided to challenge each other to read the same books from time to time. We are both completely unable to restrict ourselves to one book on the go so the basic idea was roughly once a month to finish the same book and discuss it. The only rules were that neither of us could have read the book before and we both had to agree the choice. We more or less took it in turns to choose the book. It worked swimmingly until we hit good old St Augstine who brought us to a grinding halt (or rather to our intellectual knees). We almost didn't recover. This update is to look back over the past year of reading.
So it all begin for some reason which I can't remember now I decided to start with Somerset Maugham - an author who had never previously really crossed my mind though Cosimo had read enough to think it might be of interest; and so we embarked upon Cakes and Ale. It seems ages ago now, but bits are still quite vivid. The characterisation is brilliant. Oddly it still has the power to shock even though the affairs probably have less power nowadays than at Maugham's time.
Then Cosimo decided that having owned the Scarlet Letter for years we ought to read it; a second consideration was that Cosimo thought it would be dry and difficult but that given it was arguably the first great American novel we ought to "assess its merits". I have to confess I was less than certain about this since for similar reasons I had been avoiding it for years. I was wrong to do so. It was one of the best books we have read in our oddly eclectic set of reading matter. One would be well advised not to read the ill fitting prologue which has nothing to do with anything really and is slow and annoying but once past that, the language, the characters, the depiction of the society draw you in. Both of us found it utterly compelling. I stayed up FAR too late reading it and was quite glad it wasn't term time when I was reading it. We both discovered that neither of us knew even vaguely what it was about, but I am not going to tell you here either because telling to much about it might ruin it (in the way that the person who wrote the description on the back of the Riders - the book we are currently reading has somewhat managed to do).
Before we embarked on The Scarlet Letter we promised ourselves something frivilous and frothy as a reward. Oddly enough it is more difficult to find light books to agree on than weighty tomes and also of course having read the Scarlet Letter we found we weren't quite so in need of something light, but by that time the decision had been made, and we embarked on the cheery world of Leave it to Psmith (Cosimo's choice - I had already read some Wodehouse and knew I liked him).
Leave it to Psmith doesn't actually leave a lot to discuss. It is great fun, and though definitely of its era, the humour doesn't tire. It is funnier than most contemporary books - at least by my sampling. Bits of it make you laugh out loud, and I think you would have to be in a really curmudgeonly mood not to enjoy it. That said the plot is merely a device to keep you turning the pages between the jokes and farcical situations. Still if anyone has a big cameleous hump as Kipling puts it Leave it to Psmith might be a good remedy.
Well this has begun us tiptoeing through the year. If I had kept the blog more up-to-date I might not being having such a big catch up to do, but that gives a taster of some of what we have been reading. Meanwhile I am off for a big bowl of home-made Scotch broth and then to follow the trail of a certain lost soul from Australia as he wends his way round Europe in Tim Winton's the Rider. The first three books we read are remarkably different from most of the ones this blog has dealt with to date. Maugham's Cakes and Ale did involve some travelling and restless souls but the focus was within England; Psmith is firmly entrenched in English soil and the Scarlet Letter just as deeply bound to America, so you see not all my reading involves voyaging but its still the blog of a book voyager.

Back from the brink

Well this blog has been more or less moribund for the last couple of months, thereby rather defeating the purpose in blogging, but I thought that today I would bring it back from the brink and write a wee bit more. It is not that the last two months have not been rather full of reading - indeed that has been part of the problem. I have been reading, marking and inwardly digesting on a vast array of topics, but finding precious little time to write.

In the last wee while we have continued plodding our way through the Americas with Clendinnen, Hemming, Townsend and co, reducing the once proud civilizations of the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas to rubble, following the Spanish as they trecked through the jungles of the Yucatan and up into the high Andes. We also took a foray away from the New World with the Jesuits to Japan. 

The story of the Christian century in Japan does not make happy reading, I have to say, and the final near-quashing of Christianity in Japan with the steady drive to force people to apostasize makes one stop and think. It has been a term reading all about encounters between different societies, but this caused me to stop and think more than many. There is a lot of heavy (and heavy going) primary and secondary material on this, but if people want to read a truly depressing novel on the subject, I can recommend Shusaku Endo's novel Silence. From Japan it was a short but not very cheerful hop across the Pacific to the New World, where we looked at the first Jesuit missionaries in New France and the horrors and difficulties of their experiences. If people are interested, the reports of the Jesuits in New France make fascinating reading, and give you a wealth of information on language, climate, people in a now lost world. At the same time, they too have their share of tragedy and torture. On this rather grimmer aspect, if anyone is looking for a cheerless evening in, I can recommend the film (or the book) Black Robe for the purpose. 

The cruelty that human can inflict on human seems to have been rather a dominant feature of reading lately and is not why I love history, nor what I seek to read for pleasure. The history of encounters seems to bring out the worst in humankind. Looking at current debates about the use of torture in interregotation you wonder whether the world ever changes.

On that melancholy note, it is not all cheerless. We have been reading about European ideas about the Nature of the North American Native through a range of books ranging from Pagden's Fall of Natural Man through Lestringant's Cannibals, to the Myth of the Savage, and in the midst of some truly weird and repellent theories you find throughout history, people defending the fact that "all mankind is one."

On a lighter note I cannot recommend Diana Wynne Jones' highly enough. I have been reading her books since I was a kid, and love them as much as ever. You travel with her through the pages of her books into new worlds; you are frequently forced to think, and as frequently made to laugh out loud - a good antedote to some of the other reading I have indulged in.

On which note, I had better leave the pages of the world wide web, and even the fantastical worlds of Diana Wynne Jones, and  instead journey with Richard Hakluyt to all the regions of the world that he could find out about, tracing travels through the pages of books. He collects narratives that display a sheer exuberance at the world out there. It can be a pleasure to voyage with him through the pages of a book.

back to the web

Once again, I have been falling behind in updating this blog, but then the last couple of weeks of term are always manic so that might explain why. Now there feels a bit of time to breath and look back on it all. Once again it has been a mix of web journeying, train travel and book voyaging. A highlight was heading off down with a group of students to the National Maritime to learn about the Northwest passage. We got to work our way through admiralty charts from all periods, see the improbaility of the kind of maps that Hudson was basing his travels on, view at close quarters Franklin's last letters and read some of the most adulatory and least reliable works on Hudson that I have ever come across. For a wonder the trains also worked and the whole group of us were able to get group tickets to London and back cheaply and on time on the Chiltern network. I am rapidly growing to appreciate that service. It may meander its way along but it does tend to arrive more or less on time - something that could not be said of this weekend's jaunt. 

Now here is a querry? Would you not have thought that setting off on a train from Birmingham to London at 9:30am one would be perfectly safe for two pm carol singing? Would you not have been absolutely certain that one should be able to arrive for a 6pm opera? Well, when all is said and done, Virgin trains did succeed in bringing me to my destination in time for the opera but the singing went out the window. At 11:45 our train was still sitting somewhere outside Coventry. At about this time, Virgin rail anounced that because of flooding and/or signal failure (reports varied) no trains would be continuing. Instead when they had found enough buses for our 9 carriage train, they would meet us at Berkswell station and bus us back to Birmingham! What amazed me was how muted the protest was. There was definite muttering, but it did not even reach the level of disbelief whereas I was sitting there thinking in what other country could this happen? We patently did not want to be back in Birmingham. We had all left there at 9:30. Why take us back? If they could get the buses surely they could take us on? The majority of British train users however seemed to be resigned to the fact that they might not ever reach their destination or the shows that seemed to be the main reason for us all heading south. To do Virgin rail justice, it did then get the train through and we arrived only 3 hours late and they did allow us free food and water; they also brought me back in record time for a Sunday train the next day.

Well clearly too much of my time has been spent on trains in the last wee while, but that has had some advantages for the book voyaging front. I am still working my way through the trials and victories of Augustine, but at least I am no longer totally stalled. I have also had rather a lot of fun reading M. M. Kaye's Shadow of the Moon. It is a great read - a fictionalised love story, but at the same time a beautifully-researched account of the Indian Mutiny. Sometimes the story loses it a bit as Kaye's fascination with the mutiny takes over (Kaye was the grand-daughter of one of the earliest historians of the Indian Mutiny, John Kaye), but it is a good read despite its horrendous back-drop.  

One of my students has also got me more intrigued by the Klondike gold rush (in which I have always had an interest) so I have journeyed from one continent to another and followed some of the women on the trail of gold. 

Along with my students, I have also travelled with the Incas as they journeyed the length and breadth of their empire, consolidating their rule, voyaged with Frobisher up into the frozen arctic (those early explorers were MAD!!!), and sympathised with Sebastian Munster as he tried to make sense of the geogaphy of the Early Modern world. Most recently I have picked up Anthony Grafton's What was History and am suffering pangs of jealousy. I want to have his breadth of knowledge. 

It is time to leave the world of the world wide web now, however, and get back to the pages of a good book. I may be jealous of Grafton, but I want to know more of what he has to say, and travel back with him through the pages of time and the understanding of history. Later, however, it will be back to something and I shall either travel in the mind out to India or up to Yorkshire. M.M. Kaye is going to be competing with Jack Sheffield's Mister Teacher for my spare time. I feel that ironing and cleaning should also be in the competition, but with two good books calling to me, I can predict that they will lose, and instead I shall be travelling vicariously through another's words.

A long time gone

It seems ages since I last updated this blog, and it is not as if I have not been travelling here there and everywhere both in word and action. Indeed, I have even damaged my carbon footprint by travelling by car down to investigate the joys of the Taylorian library (where we once again followed the Portuguese on their travels round the world), and then further afield to Carlton to meet friends and retrieve much missed furniture. The main problem is I haven't discovered Harry Potter's time turner. If Ihad I might manage to have enough hours in the day to read all that I wish, travel through the world wide web, and meander my way around Britain in addition to teaching my courses and keeping a blog up to date. As it is, my alotted time span has to suffice. Nonetheless in this week we have managed to follow Betanzos and Zarate and de la Vega as they looked with Spanish eyes onto the intricacies of Incan customs and religion. We followed Sabine McCormack as she deciphered their reactions for us. Then it was a quick dash north to sail with Jacques Cartier up the St Lawrence and suffer with him as his men succumbed like flies to the horrors of scurvy and the terrors of a winter in a hostile land. I have also found time to follow a certain St from Hippo as he confesses the details of his life. Closer to home, I have also recently come across a real joy of a book. Perhaps it is not a joy for all but for a homesick Scot and a historian, the Flindlater's Crossriggs has provided delightful soothing reading. On which note, it is time to stop logging (or blogging) on books and travelling through the world wide web and instead to pedal my way back to a freezing Victorian townhouse that seems to have travelled back into the past. It certainly has not grasped that there are such modern luxuries as efficient heating or insulation! That said there is nothing to stop one nestling down there with a good book.