On a book meme.

A while (a long while) ago, Reed tagged me with a book meme. Which I haven’t been ignoring, but just procrastinating over. It’s something worrying when you end up writing essays instead of fiddling with the blog, but at least I’ve got my priorities right (I always put off the most important thing).  

Total Number of Books Owned – Well, let’s just say B has started building more bookshelves in discreet places above doors and stairwells. Although that’s a positively restrained number of volumes as I have banned myself from buying any but the most important, or the cheapest, books and mostly get reading matter out of the library. I am currently a member of 7 libraries in the UK.

The best thing about being back here is the availability of libraries and charity shop bargains. English books in Russia were either expensive or available in limited selections from one second hand shop and colleagues. Which is how I came to be so desperate as to read David Eddings’ entire Shanarra series. There was one library, now I think about it, with foreign books in. But the English selection mostly consisted of third rate American novels, so…

Last Books Bought – How Students Learn: History in the Classroom; Learning to Teach in the Secondary School: A Companion to School Experience; History in Practice. Well, I am doing a course.

Last Book Read – The National Curriculum: a Critical Review, which is a rather philosophical little piece basically all about how schooling can’t be regimented, rigorous or in any way actually useful for it to be worthwhile as an educational experience, and No Humans Involved, which is about werewolves. And necromancy.

Actually that’s what I wrote when I first had a go at this a few weeks ago. Now it’s Assessment: A teacher’s guide to the issues, which has had me mentally reorganising the structure of the entire secondary school and the way it’s tested, and For A Few Demons More, which is about witches, vampires, demons and werewolves. There’s a bit of a pattern going on here, donchathink?

Five books that mean a lot to me – In no particular order…

1. The Dark is Rising.

 I’m fond of the whole Dark is Rising series, a teenage fiction saga about the final battle with evil, set in modern day Britain, or rather the seventies as that’s when it was written. It’s the only story including Arthur I’ll tolerate, primarily because the Arthurian strand is largely swamped by the author including as much British folklore as is humanly possible, and also because it’s not actually about Arthur, who only has a bit part. 

It’s hitting the screens as a film as we speak. I’m a little concerned as according to the trailer, the hero – well, one of the heroes – seems to have gained years, inches and a girlfriend, but heigh ho.

Anyway.

The book The Dark is Rising made me go to Russia. Snow features largely in the book and it is lovingly and lengthily described and when I read it as a teenager, that was me sold on snow and the frozen countryside. Actually living with the realities of it has not dimmed its glories either. I miss snow.

2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts) and pretty much anything else Douglas Adams wrote, which is to say not much when it comes to actual novels and such.

This obsession is my Dad’s fault. He liked it, and I read it.  My brother read it. We called the boat Don’t Panic written in big friendly letters, upside down, on the transom. We have had earnest discussions about refinements to the Shoe Event Horizon theory. I can’t see the number 42 without feeling that it is in some way significant, and I practice the art of zen navigation favoured by Dirk Gently, with considerable success. I always bear in mind that the first thing anyone says to a double bass player is ‘I bet you wish you played the piccolo’ when meeting undertakers, estate agents and so on for the first time. Although I think Mr Adams is showing his general knowledge off there, as I tended to find that most people didn’t know a piccolo from piccalilli, so what they actually said to me was ‘That’s a big violin, fnar fnar, how do you get that under your chin then?’ I feel a warmness towards Apple Macs, Lord’s cricket ground and St Pancreas station. I sneer at the scene in Friends where Ross gets a sofa stuck half way up a flight of stairs and I frequently have the urge to tip all available bath time smellies currently occupying my shelves into the water at once. I… OK, the point is probably made by now.

3.  Many, many books written by Robert A Heinlein.

Who I read at an impressionable age and who seems to have had an unfortunate effect on my political outlook. Which I found myself trying to describe the other day as an uneasy cross between authoritarian socialism at a time when communism is deeply unfashionable and rampant libertarianism in a country which doesn’t understand such a category.

Luckily, I seem to have avoided imprinting his sexual mores, mainly because I find Lazarus Long a bit tedious and Stranger in a Strange Land a bit dull – for some of his adult books, I suspect you had to be there for the hugginess and the sexual revolution in the sixties for them to really strike a chord.

But for straight adventure storytelling, when he’s doing straight adventure storytelling, he’s hard to beat. This is my story and I’m sticking to it.

4. Great Works of Russian literature.

For some reason, I always thought Russian literature was liable to be depressing and long, a bit like Jude the Obscure only more so. Actually, I suspect this is also Heinlein’s fault as this is the view expressed by one of his characters during a splendidly vicious Cold War inspired character assassination of Russians past, present and future in The Number of the Beast.

Someone on a TV culture show was saying recently that Chekhov is the greatest writer ever because he sees and writes about human frailties perceptively, but doesn’t condemn his characters for them. So far, with the exception of Dostoevsky, who is as miserable as anyone could possibly want, I have found everything I’ve read by any Russian writer readable, warmly sympathetic and frequently very funny as well. Even War and Peace has a happy ending for goodness sake, and so does Anna Karenina, if you agree with me that Anna deserves to get squashed by a train for her pathetically unRussian inability to rise to occasion of a bit of adversity. Pushkin was as likely to write smutty limericks as epic poems about love, which I find absolutely delightful, and nobody does satire better than some of the twentieth century commentators, none of whose writing, not one word, is as drearily self pitying as circumstances could have excused.

Anyway, it’s hard to tell if I like Russia so much because I like their literature, or if I like their literature because I like Russia so much, but there you go.

5. It’s a tie between Humanity, which I’ve already written about here, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Which is probably the book which helped me undertstand more about human frailties and capabilities than any other.

 I’m supposed to tag people at this point. Consider yourself tagged.

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