liadnan | Books and Things

I have a general policy of not doing these things, still, rules are meant to be broken and Hypatia asked. And since, having given up trying to work at home because of the moronic vandal with the chain saw outside, I find myself banished to the desk-less greenhouse on the roof of our building because my office is being painted, I might as well:-

1) Total number of books owned: Somewhere in the region of 5000 I believe.

2) The last book I bought: Not counting that thrilling work The White Book 2005 (Lord Woolf did it with the overriding objective and they all get conditional fees in the end), I'm not entirely sure, somewhat oddly. I've managed to preserve my economically-imposed moratorium for almost two months now, the previous record being about two weeks. I suspect it was something in Murder One/New Worlds' moving sale, and thus probably a replacement or something I never quite felt the urge to buy at full price but felt I ought to own. Or it may have been Mario Vargos Llosa, The Feast of the Goat.

3) The last book I read: Ruoff and Roper on Registered Land.

Alternatively... I have a bad habit of reading several things at once. The last thing I finished was George R.R Martin's A Game of Thrones, as part of the intended re-read. (In the course of which I had a new theory about one of the open questions in it that has long bugged me, incidentally.) Perez-Reverte's The Fencing Master is on the go as well. As is Don Quixote

4) Five books that mean a lot to me: Five? You are joking?
Oh well, lets see. I'm going to count sequences, series, and trilogies as one when I feel like it though. Prose fiction only or we'll be here all night. Not in any particular order:-

1: James Morrow: The Corpus Dei Trilogy. Or at least the first two: Towing Jehovah wherein God dies and falls to earth, and his body is towed to the arctic on the orders of the Vatican; and Blameless in Abaddon, in which it is discovered he isn't quite dead after all and his comatose body is put on trial for crimes against humanity. Hysterically funny, and extremely serious. What religious sense I have owes a lot to this, Kazantzakis (see below), and Teilhard de Chardin.

2: Nikos Kazantzakis: The Last Temptation.

3: Robertson Davies: The Cornish Trilogy, (cite>The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus). A lucky find in Winchester library one day many years ago. Picked up simply because of the attractive cover of The Lyre of Orpheus. Such a clever man. His grasp of character and novel structure are among the best that come to mind.

4: Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward. I don't need to explain Banks to most people who read this journal. Unlike many Banks fans, I think LtW is the best thing he has yet done, on either side of his output, possibly the best thing he will ever do, and it's at several levels a sequel to CP: the two are best seen as a pair. In addition, Banks is responsible for introducing me to the Culture List, which amused, entertained, irritated and absorbed me for many years and lives on yet, not only in actual if moribund form but also alive and well and sublimed into the blogosphere.

5: Mary Stewart: The Merlin Trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, and the pendant, told from Medraut/Mordred's POV, The Wicked Day). The best modern treatment of the Arthur legend through the prism of the 1960s attempts by early medievalists to construct a "historical Arthur" (beating even Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset). Largely responsible for hooking me on Arthurian things, which in time led me to academic work in late antique and early medieval history. Let's shove T.H. White's Once and Future King in here as well and hope no one notices I'm cheating. A major early influence on how I think about life, the universe, and everything.

4: (you didn't see what I did there): Susan Cooper The Dark Is Rising. In equal place, Alan Garner's entire children's output, most particularly The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath and Ursula LeGuin's Wizard of Earthsea.

3 and a half: Rosemary Sutcliff: The Eagle of the Ninth. I remember this being read to me when I was very young indeed. I re-read it recently, and it's still well worth it. Lindsey Davis dedicated Poseidon's Gold: In memory of Rosemary Sutcliff, who died while this was being written: on behalf of all the children who know how far it is from Venta to the mountains. Quite.

2: Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet. I can't really put my finger on why.

2.75: Dorothy L. Sayers: Gaudy Night. Just beats The Nine Tailors as my favourite of hers. The mystery is really the least important element: really just a hook on which to hang a love story, a feminist manifesto, a debate on the merits of academia and the importance of academic honesty, and Oxford.

2 and a quarter: Eco: Foucault's Pendulum: most Eco fans I know like this one least. I love it. The best serious answer to all conspiracy theorists ever.

2.323 Antonia Forest: Falconer's Lure. If you've heard of it, you know already. If you don't, "run and find out"

1: Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I just don't care.

Your bourgeois notions of conventional arithmetic mean nothing to me. And I haven't even mentioned The Magus; or anything by Marquez; or Austen; or Vanity Fair... And now I come to think of it, there's Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill and Stalky and Co.; Stephen Marlowe The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes; Amin Maalouf, Samarkand; Guneli Gun, On the Road to Baghdad; Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm; Mary Renault's Last of the Wine; Dodie Smith's, I Capture the Castle; A.S.Byatt, Possession; Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; Molesworth; Greene's Monsignor Quixote; Brideshead Revisited; Hyperion... All genuinely books that mean a lot to me, not just books I like a lot (that list would be far longer). This is why I don't do these things: if they're interesting they're just too hard.

I'm not big on the tagging thing, so won't. Do it or not, as you please.

However, since I'm doing this, Dr Lovely wanted to know about:

Things you enjoy, even when no one around you wants to go out and play. What lowers your stress/blood pressure/anxiety level?

Well.. reading (duh). Smoking. Lying in the sun. Listening to music, preferably live, (doesn't matter whether it's the RFH, the Proms, or Glastonbury, so long as it's good). Reading the blogosphere. Reading about obscure things in libraries. Daydreaming. Making up stories. Sitting in the sun outside a café in Primrose Hill or Soho and watching the world go by. Swimming in the river at my parents'. Watching cricket or tennis. Being in the Cyclades. Lots of things. None of which are cutting it right now.