Lost in the Stacks

If you are interested to take a closer peek at what’s on my bookshelves, do drop by at Danielle’s A Work in Progress.

Danielle has very kindly invited me to take part in her on-going series of ‘Lost in the Stacks: Home Edition’ posts, whereby other bloggers are asked to share about their books and bookshelves. It’s great fun if you haven’t yet discover her lovely blog (which incidentally, was the first book blog I had ever started reading, and also the one that was responsible for introducing me to the book-loving blogosphere.) 🙂

Ballad of Books: One book too many?

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TOO MANY BOOKS

I would that we were only readers now,
And wrote no more, or in rare heats of soul,
Sweated out thoughts when the o’er-burden’d brow
Was powerless to control.

Then would all future books be small and few,
And, freed of dross, the soul’s refinèd gold;
So should we have a chance to read the new,
Yet not forego the old.

But as it is, Lord help us, in this flood
Of daily papers, books, and magazines!
We scramble blind as reptiles in the mud,
And know not what it means.

Is it the myriad spawn of vagrant tides,
Whose growth would overwhelm both sea and shore,
Yet often necessary loss, provides
Sufficient and no more?

Is it the broadcast sowing of the seeds,
And from the stones, the thorns and fertile soil,
Only enough to serve the world’s great needs
Rewards the sower’s toil?

Is it all needed for the varied mind?
Gives not the teeming press a book too much—
Not one, but in its dense neglect shall find
Some needful heart to touch?

Ah, who can say that even this blade of grass
No mission has—superfluous as it looks?
Then wherefore feel oppressed and cry, Alas,
There are too many books!

Robert Leighton, from ‘Reuben, and Other Poems’ (1875).

I think this would be a ballad I should find myself singing on most days. And if there are enough of us feeling the same, perhaps we could even get together and form a choir? 😉

The joy of new books!

Behold, my latest batch of beauties to join in the stacks!

And they couldn’t have come at a better price, only RM5 each (equivalent to USD1.60 or £1) save the Orhan Pamuk, and they’re all new as well! These were all picked up from the recent Aftermath Sales of the same fantastic book sales I went to at the end of last year.

I was thrilled to find a copy of Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please as I have been really curious to try out his writing, ever since havong read a particularly convincing piece of review on one of his collections on a blog some time ago. And so having gotten my hands on it, I wasted no time in diving straight in, but only to find myself feeling somewhat disappointed with what I found. Maybe this being his first collection of stories, one could say that I should still give him another try, and maybe I will. But as it is, I am already struggling to finish the remaining stories in here. I don’t doubt that Carver is a good writer, it’s just that I didn’t quite like the taste I’m left with at the end of each story.

Doris Lessing is another writer whose short stories I have been wanting to sample. And from what I’ve managed to glean to so far, I think there’s a possibility that we just might get along much better. Anyway, here’s hoping for a more rewarding journey To Room Nineteen.

Next up, two biographies of two formidable & accomplished women, both of whom I am unfamiliar with but am highly interested to learn more about now. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald is said to be an “…. unexpectedly gripping portrait of Bloomsbury’s saddest poet”. The poet whom Thomas Hardy had once declared being ‘far and away the best living woman poet’ of the twentieth century, has a tragic tale to tell. “To all appearances, she was a dutiful daughter living at home with a monster of an old mother. The proprieties had to be observed and no one must know that the Mews had no money, that two siblings were insane and that Charlotte was a secret lesbian, living a life of self-inflicted frustration. Despite literary success and a passionate, enchanting personality, eventually the conflicts within her drove her to despair, and she killed herself by swallowing household disinfectant.” 
Would anyone here be familiar with her poetry, by any chance?

Norah Lindsay: The Life And Art of a Garden Designer by Allyson Hayward, is the other formidable personality I am curious to be acquainted with. This lovely coffee table book tells the story of famous English garden designer, Norah Lindsay’s life and work, who interestingly just began her career at the age of 51 after finding herself with “no husband, no money, no home…..” as she wrote a friend. Her commissions ranged from the gardens of quiet English manor houses to the grand estates of the country house set, to royal gardens in Italy, France and Yugoslavia. She gardened in different soils and varied climates across all of England and throughout Europe. All this time she managed to give the impression that she remained ‘a social butterfly, a gadfly’.  The truth is that although she dined at the tables of the rich, the next day she would be up at dawn to work with their gardeners.”  I am really interested to read about this esteemed gardener whose circle of upper-class friends included the likes of Winston Churchill, the Prince of Wales and Edith Wharton. The book also comes with a fair amount of photographs of the prized gardens. This had to be the bargain of the day (or year!) considering the price I paid for it!

I was also very pleased at finding a good few books on travel writing (one of my favourite genres) at the sale. Two Patrick Leigh Fermor  ‘A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods & the Water’, a Paul Theroux ‘The Tao of Travel’,  W.G Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’, Robert Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana and an anthology of travel stories in Escape: Stories of Getting Away.  The anthology is made up of contributions from a rather impressive list of writers such as Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Parsons, Vladimir Nabokov, Issac Bashevis Singer, John Updike, Michael Chabon, Jamaica Kincaid, D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Townsend Warner and a few others. ‘Who doesn’t dream of escape, whether to defy the strictures of a conventional or restricted life, to outrun the fates, to pursue an extraordinary goal, or, most inevitably, to distance oneself from the suffering, loss, and pain that unavoidably bear down on our lives. Now Escape is the first collection to bring together a wide array of the very finest stories about this universal impulse.’
I think there’s gonna be some really good stuff in there.

I also got myself a copy of Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories handpicked by the author himself (Conan Doyle) and Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales which somehow appealed very much to me in that particular edition I found it in. Skimming through the pages, I realised just how little I had managed to retain of all those fairy tales I vaguely remember reading. It’s time for a refresher, I think.

I had been on the lookout for D.E Stevenson’s Mrs Tim of the Regiment for quite a long time now, and was naturally delighted to find a solitary copy among the stacks on that day. Jane Gleeson-White is new to me, but her Classics: Books for Life, both look and sound good to me and so it found its way home with me as well. And lastly, Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colours. Pamuk has been on my ‘intend to read’ list for some time now, and this collection of essays (and a story) sounds as good as any place to start with.

 

Oh, the joy of new books!

🙂

Ballad of Books: A Nook and a Book

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A NOOK AND A BOOK

Give me a nook and a book,
And let the proud world spin round;
Let it scramble by hook or by crook
For wealth or a name with a sound.
You are welcome to amble your ways,
Aspirers to place or to glory;
May big bells jangle your praise,
And golden pens blazon your story!
For me, let me dwell in my nook,
Here by the curve of this brook,
That croons to the tune of my book,
Whose melody wafts me forever
On the waves of an unseen river.

Give me a book and a nook
Far away from the glitter and strife;
Give me a staff and a crook,
The calm and the sweetness of life;
Let me pause—let me brood as I list,
On the marvels of heaven’s own spinning—
Sunlight and moonlight and mist,
Glorious without slaying or sinning.
Vain world, let me reign in my nook,
King of this kingdom, my book,
A region by fashion forsook;
Pass on, ye lean gamblers for glory,
Nor mar the sweet tune of my story!

William Freeland, from ‘A Birth Song and other
Poems.’  1882.

I am sure the nook that William Freeland had in mind back then in 1882 was nothing like the Nook as we have now come to know. But had he been alive today, I wouldn’t be all that surprised too if he were to feel just as inspired to pen these same words here.

Would you? 😉

A Country Doctor’s Notebook

I picked up the knife, trying to imitate the man I had once in my life seen perform an amputation, at university. I entreated fate not to let her die at least in the next half hour. ‘Let her die in the ward, when I’ve finished the operation…’
I had only common sense to rely on, and it was stimulated into action by the extraordinary situation. Like an experienced butcher, I made a neat circular incision in her thigh with the razor-sharp knife and the skin parted without exuding the smallest drop of blood. ‘What will I do if the vessels start bleeding?’ I thought, and without turning my head glanced at the row of forceps. I cut through a huge piece of female flesh together with one of the vessels – it looked like a little whitish pipe – but not a drop of blood emerge from it. I stopped it up with a pair of forceps and proceeded, clamping on forceps wherever I suspected the existence of a vessel.
‘Arteria…. arteria…. what the devil is it called?’ The operating theatre had begun to take on a thoroughly professional look. The forceps were hanging in clusters. My assistants drew them back with gauze, retracting the flesh, and I started sawing the round bone with a gleaming, fine-toothed saw. 
‘Why isn’t she dying? It’s astonishing…. God, how people cling to life!’

Mikhail Bulgakov, ‘The Country Doctor’s Notebook’

I am happy to report that my first encounter with Mikhail Bulgakov has been a great success! We managed to hit it off splendidly, much better than I had expected. Incidentally, this was also my first encounter with one of the Russian literary greats. I am now seriously looking forward to getting better acquainted with the some of the other Russians as well – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov et al., all of whom I have long had an interest or fascination with, but somehow have yet to get down to reading any of their works. Till now.

Although my chosen route to getting acquainted with Bulgakov was not by way of his most acclaimed masterpiece, The Master & Margarita, it was nonetheless a most rewarding experience to meet him at his twenty five year old self, when he was Dr Mikhail Bulgakov, a fresh medical school graduate who had just been posted to a far flung rural Russian village. The nine partly-fictional, partly autobiographical stories in this collection are inspired by the eighteen gruelling months between 1916-1917, where he had given of his services as a medical doctor. Each of the stories are told in a down to earth manner, revealing the different feelings of fear, doubt and inadequacy that the poor young helpless doctor had to deal with and conquer, in order to get the job done. In many cases, it’s usually a matter of life and death. 

The reader is given a close up glimpse as to the thoughts and emotions running through the heart and mind of the young protagonist with each emergency procedure he has to perform, with each decision he has to make. And all this is to be done with no help or advice from any contemporary or senior staff as he is the only doctor running the hospital with just a medical assisant and two midwives to aid. That, and thankfully also for the volumes of medical texts stocked up by the previous doctor in residence. Reading the intense accounts of emergency amputations, of the insertion of steel windpipes into the throats of toddlers, of complicated childbirths, of journeying through deadly blizzards in order to get to the patients, and other equally trying scenarios, one cannnot help but be taken along for the roller-coaster like experience! There is also one particularly gripping and intimate first person account of an individual’s slow descent into drug addiction. A very powerful depiction of the horrors and evils of drugs, once they are abused. A truly recommended read, to one and all. 

I am really looking forward to reading ‘The Master & The Margarita’ next.

Ballad of Books: The Library

THE LIBRARY

“Let there be Light!” God spake of old,
And over chaos dark and cold,
And through the dead and formless frame
Of nature, life and order came.

Faint was the light at first that shone
On giant fern and mastodon,
On half-formed plant and beast of prey,
And man as rude and wild as they.

Age after age, like waves o’erran
The earth, uplifting brute and man;
And mind, at length, in symbols dark
Its meanings traced on stone and bark.

On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll,
On plastic clay and leathern scroll,
Man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed,
And lo! the Press was found at last!

Then dead souls woke; the thoughts of men
Whose bones were dust revived again;
The cloister’s silence found a tongue,
Old prophets spake, old poets sung.

And here, to-day, the dead look down,
The kings of mind again we crown;
We hear the voices lost so long,
The sage’s word, the sibyl’s song.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves,
Alive along these crowded shelves;
And Shakspere treads again his stage,
And Chaucer paints anew his age.

As if some Pantheon’s marbles broke
Their stony trance, and lived and spoke,
Life thrills along the alcoved hall,
The lords of thought awake our call.

John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘The Library’ (Sung at the opening of the Library at Haverhill, Massachusetts on November 11, 1875.)

Now I am really curious to know how this ballad would have sounded like, being sung to tune. I wonder if there is any possibility that this ballad might still be sung in any part of the world today, like an old tradition or old hymn that has been passed down through the generations, perhaps?  Wouldn’t it be lovely to know, if it was?

The Seashell and the Book

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A child and a man were one day walking on the seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear. Suddenly he heard sounds,–strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home. The child’s face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell, apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child’s wonder.

Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment, at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new world, to love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter. Behind every book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected. These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message. In a word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible, is to determine some of its essential qualities.

William J. Long, ‘English Literature: Its History & Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World’