waterproof writing aids

A conversation with its originator revealed that I had at least slightly misunderstood the intended slant of the lecture for which I was running through stuff on the early medieval papacy a little while ago, which is just as well given how much I managed to find. I assume that the situation is better in non-English languages, not least Italian I suppose, but really, for the tenth and early eleventh century one does struggle a bit. I mean, there’s no separate coverage of the Papacy in the 900-1024 volume of the New Cambridge Medieval History; it’s subsumed into Rosamond McKitterick’s chapter on the Church, but the papacy is also a state, you know?¹ There’s Ullmann’s Short History of the Papacy of course, but it is, well, short, basically institutional and far from recent.² I was at something of a loss and so a learned colleague offered me a strange kind of rescue in the form of a loan of the relevant volumes of Gregorovius’s City of Rome.³

Volumes III and IV.1 of Gregorovius's History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages

Now, you will see that though this is longer it is not newer. I didn’t even know it existed in translation, I knew of it merely by repute as the pavement on which subsequent histories have been based. And it is, in translation at least, an easy and entertaining as well as, for the standards of its time, highly erudite, read. (There are a few ambiguous points that make me suspect that in the German it is probably even clearer, as they seem like problems caused by the loss of the ability to inflect.) But oh lor’, it is of its time. Every successful king is brave and chivalrous (yes yes I know we barely have knights yet, maybe this was the translator’s choice), every losing one craven and malign, every woman who features is either meek and pious (if religious and ineffective) or beautiful, cruel, headstrong and ungovernable (if politically active, though all of those except the beauty were, to be fair, probably entry-level requirements for anyone in Roman politics in this era). There are no in-betweens and everything is straight out of a time of heroes and villains in a struggle between civilisation and barbarism. And of course, sometimes there was some truth in that, but with passages like:

Italy [after the death of King Berengar] sank into chaotic anarchy. Throughout the country we see nothing but smoking cities, upon whose ruins the savage Hungarians hold their wild Bacchanalia, the inhabitants flying for refuge to the mountains. We see kings, vassals and bishops struggling for the blood-stained shreds of power, and beautiful laughing women who, like Furies, seem to head the wild procession. Contemporary chronicles or records of immediately succeeding times are so confused as to present but a labyrinth to the student…

you will readily see what I mean.⁴ This is Old History Writ Large (very large, in fact, the full set is eight volumes in translation, and some of those volumes are in separate parts), and criticism of the sources, rather than of their subjects, is largely lacking. Gregorovius did insert a fair few footnotes where he dealt with conflicting readings of sources by scholars, or with conflicts between the sources themselves, but they never touch the whole “why is the author saying that anyway?” question we try and get through to our students so much: the closest he comes is a short reflection on whether or not Liutprand of Cremona can be trusted for anything.⁵ It’s that whole paradigm of ‘reliability’, which is a character judgement and not a judgement of information available to the writer or of his motives, about which I could write a whole separate post.

So, why on earth am I bothering? Well, partly because it is to hand and, however dated, fun. But also because as he says, the sources for this period are a labyrinth. And the big virtue of this old book is that Gregorovius sorted them out. At the end of this you feel like you have a chronology, and a grasp on what actually happened. Now, half of what he reports may be made up, because his method was basically to slot things into a chronology like a jigsaw until everything that was known and found `reliable’ was slotted in somewhere. But it’s from there that critique can start. So I see why this has been the foundation of later work. But I think we could really use building a bit more round these parts, by now.

text© Raj Arumugam, 2009; pictures: burningwell

Prince WordSpit of BiblioPhilia
he reads and reads
and forgets to eat;
and King AdorePrince procures
all the books in the world;
and his blessed son reads
night and day
till the sun and moon
are but words in scientific papers

Prince WordSpit of BiblioPhilia
reads so much
and does nothing else
he’s lost the use of his body parts
and fingers and limbs;
and he’s become so much but mind now
he doesn’t need to eat and to think
but he needs to read and read and read
and he wears these thick-rimmed glasses
that are larger than his head;
and his feet have sprouted roots to the Princely floor

and King AdorePrince of BiblioPhilia
he has asked for help
for Prince WordSpit reads so much
his fingers are but stiff, brittle twigs;
and so King AdorePrince of BiblioPhilia
he has asked for help
for Prince WordSpit
has no strength even
to turn the leaves of a book

and so King AdorePrince of BiblioPhilia
has announced two positions:
a Royal Book Holder
to hold the book up before the Prince;
and a Royal Page Turner
to turn over each page
as the Prince goes over to the next leaf

and the two positions must be filled ASAP
and the following are the qualifications
for each of the two vacancies:
the Royal Book Holder
must describe himself as Professional
and must have the qualities of a wooden stick,
senseless, mindless and dead as wood;
and the Royal Page Turner
must describe himself as Professional
and must have a crooked finger
and further, to qualify,
the Turner must be
insensitive and unthinking -
so Professional, through and through

and so all those who describe
themselves as Professionals
and thus have no qualities
only need apply;
and those with a trace of individuality
and a hint of a mind
should go jump in a ditch
or drown in the Rhine

OK, I admit it – I’m a Bibliophile. What is a Bibliophile? Basically, a bibliophile is someone who loves books and loves collecting books. I am a book collector – but not in all topic areas. I only collect books in the areas that interest me.

I also love to read books – which I guess makes me a bookworm. Once again, I only read books in the areas that interest me.

See the article below for a discussion on Bibliophilia, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliophilia

So what areas interest me – well the list below is not an exhaustive list, but it does cover the main areas of my literary interests:

• Theology

• Church History

• History

• Wilderness

• Genealogy

There are other areas into which I sometimes dip my toes, such as horticulture, cooking, etc. However, it is the above areas that really interest me.

I’ve been reading a  lot in French lately.

[My that sounds pretentious. My apologies. I've been studying la belle langue for work, and my own pleasure, and I read. Seems logical]

Last fall, I read Ensemble, c’est tout by Anna Gavalda…a lovely story of 4 unlikely friends who find themselves sharing an elegant apartment in Paris for a time. It’s an absolutely lovely book, the characters are fascinating and realistic, and some moments will move you to tears. I mentioned it awhile ago on this blog, where the only thing I really said about it is that they’d made a movie out of it. I’ve since read the book and seen the movie — my suggestion? Forget the film. Find the book. The movie hits the bulk of the plot points without delving into the characters at all deeply — and the characters make the story truly live. (The English title chosen was Hunting and Gathering — odd.)

So then the book L’Élégance du hérisson by Muriel Barbery was recommended to me by my tutor. And I would like to thank her deeply for both (1) pointing me in the direction of this brilliant book and (2) assuming that my French was up to the high-brow erudition of this novel en français!

From the first chapter, first paragraph:

I live alone with my cat, a big lazy tom who has no distinguishing features other than the fact that his paws smell bad when he is annoyed. Neither he nor I make any effort to take part in the social doings of our respective kindred species. Because I am rarely friendly—though always polite—I am not liked, but am tolerated nonetheless: I correspond so very well to what social
prejudice has collectively construed to be a typical French concierge that I am one of the multiple cogs that make the great universal illusion turn, the illusion according to which life has a meaning that can be easily deciphered. And since it has been written somewhere that concierges are old, ugly and
sour, so has it been branded in fiery letters on the pediment of that same imbecilic firmament that the aforementioned concierges have rather large dithering cats who sleep all day on cushions that have been covered with crocheted cases.

(Source: the sample chapter on the US publisher’s site)

So there I was, reading this in French, marveling at the gorgeous sentence structure, and then I got bogged down and unfortunately had to put it aside. I found it in the wonderful English translation, and continued reading…and was not disappointed.

The publisher’s reading group guide is available, for those that enjoy filtering their reading through themes.

Any other suggestions pour des livres en français pour moi?

I have been working these last couple of months with a privately-owned book collection of mostly German books, most of which were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but some of which are a good deal older.  The book’s current owner doesn’t read German and has no relationship with the books, so identifying and describing the books has been quite a lot of CSI with just a little of Indiana Jones thrown in.  At this stage I think I have a good handle on most of the collection, excepting one particular item.

The book is a small black leather bound manuscript stamped “M.G” on the cover, and appears to contain Catholic devotions professionally inscribed in German kurrentschrift (German cursive hand, just close enough to our own handwriting to look familiar but dissimilar enough to defy easy translation) with calligraphic headlines. I don’t know who wrote it, for whom, why, when or where.

The best evidence we have of the book’s origin and provenance is an inscription on the half-title page:

This inscription is more problematic than it might first appear. The first two lines read (in German) “This book belongs to Josephine Krofft” followed by two lines of gobbledygook and a date which appears to be 1729. One might hope that this indicates the person the book was written for, her location and perhaps the date she recieved the book.  Would that it were so easy.

The date is our first and formost problem. Many of the books in this collection are from the 18th century, and so we did take this, at first, to be the date of this book’s creation as well.  The trouble began when I started to investigate the book more closely and found that the majority of the book is written on a nice weave paper with a clean, clear watermark depicting the monogram “OHL” with a crown or flame atop the “O”.

The watermark is so clean and clear that there can be no question of the paper type.  If the paper were lain – the standard paper technology in the early 18th century – you would be able to see, however faintly, chain lines in the paper when held up to a light.    Weave paper without chain lines was a technology invented in England around 1757, reaching the Continent even later.  If my book reads 1729, it must be back-dated for some reason, as the very paper it is written upon was not invented until 30 years later.

Why back-date a book?  The answer probably lies in the rest of the text on that line, which I can’t yet decipher.  I have one great fear, and that is that the date is a guess made by a previous – but not original – owner.  The second puzzle of that inscription involves a lost page.  The hasty inscription has been corrected in two places – once where a word was scratched out and written again, below, and once at the end of the third line where one word has been written over another, previously-written word (unfortunately not very visible in this picture).  The corrections were so hasty, in fact, that they have left an ink-smudge on the verso of the flyleaf facing it.  In between our inscribed half-title page and this ink-smudged flyleaf is a hanging scrap of paper where once there was another page.  So, the inscription was made after another page was removed.  What was on this missing page?  And if Josephine Krofft was the book’s first owner, why would she inscribe it after it has been altered?  I suspect now that she isn’t the first owner at all, and the missing page probably had better, more accurate evidence of provenance.  Evidence I will never actually witness.

Nevertheless the book is an intriguing find.  I’m telling you this story now because I hope that somewhere out there someone may be able to help me source this book in some way.  If you or anyone you know can read the text of that inscription,  can help me identify the paper type or has any other information on 18th (?)-century German Catholic prayer-books, please drop me a line!  Comment here or email me at charlotte@once-and-future.com.  I can provide more photos and information as required.

I do not endorse ebook piracy. But all said and done, there are several sites where you could obtain free ebooks, sometimes even of recent releases. It did not surprise me to find an e-copy of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” on the net, the day it was published.

Listed below are my favourite ebook sites:

 www.scribd.com

The ultimate free ebook website. All you need is to search for the author/ title and presto… you have it. Well, not  that easily.  But it is definitely a treasure house for ebooks.

 www.4shared.com

Similar to scribd. Here is your chance to exercise your search skills. The results could surprise you.

 www.truly-free.org

My personal favourite. A literature buff’s closely guarded site. I do not reveal it to many.  Here you would find literary gems that are not available anywhere else on the net. A jewel in the crown.

I also search www.esnips.com and www.ebookee.com for ebooks. These offer links to rapidlibrary or megaupload from where you can download the ebooks.

Insatiable bibliomaniacs, please check this link for an excellent listing of 20 best free ebook web sites.

Just finished reading The Double by José Saramago. It was my introduction to this Nobel Prize winning author.

The story revolves around Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, a reclusive history teacher suddenly confronted by his double. Afonso encounters his duplicate in a video recommended by his colleague. He chases him down despite a sinister foreboding about the consequences. Tragic events unfold, impelled by fate, once they meet.

It is said that every person has a double somewhere in the world. But we rarely ever come face to face with them in real life. In the story, destiny has located Afonso’s doppelgänger in the very same city. Saramago asserts the we can never tolerate the existence of a double once we realize their existence.

The narrative style is smooth although a single line can run into a whole paragraph punctuated by commas. Conversations frequently go back and forth spanning pages, the characters and speech discernible only by the uppercase and context. Occasionally the author appears in the guise of a narrator and inserts curious expositive passages bordering on the frivolous.

Saramago managed to capture my imagination. His facility for storytelling is remarkable. To me the plot is only marginally interesting. The anecdotes, the perspicacious insights, the style of narrative, the subtle humour and the almost poetic usage of words are what really endeared me to José Saramago. I do not have most of his works. I’m itching to lay my hands on “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” next.

Click here for an interesting review of the book.

My colleague Moe Kelley makes an incredibly important point in his recent post about the importance of aesthetics.

Yesterday I was teaching the E Ink case study in my New Technology Ventures program at London Business School. It involved a fascinating and lively discussion, about what were the key parameters that characterized the available technologies, and re-emphasized just how important the aesthetic of books is.

I love books. I have a house full of books. My wife worries about the load on the ceilings. There are stacks of them in our bedroom. And in lots of other places in the house. I have a clinical Amazon.com habit, going back more than 10 years to 10 September 1999 (my sister’s birthday), during which I have bought hundreds of books.

Nevertheless, the class almost unanimously recognized and embraced the elegance of the industrial design of the Kindle DX that I used to demonstrate what E Ink does. It’s a different aesthetic, but compelling nonetheless.

Kindle DX

Although technology (hard factors) matter, even in high-tech we must never lose sight of the importance of soft factors, such as aesthetics.

One of the most interesting and insightful pieces of thesis work that I supervised at MIT involved a systematic exploration of the relationship between these hard factors (functions, performance) and soft factors (ease of use, aesthetics), and how their relative importance to customers evolves over the life cycle of a particular product type.

Getting this balance wrong the other way can, however, also be disastrous; much of Motorola’s current parlous position flows from it being seduced by the soft factors success of the RAZR:

Motorola RAZR V3

It provides the user with a total sensory experience – from the innovative metallic finishes and use of materials to a truly revolutionary, chemically etched keypad created from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy. The Motorola RAZR V3 is the ultimate, beautiful slim-phone.

Take time out to enjoy the feel, touch and finish of the model RAZR V3. The metal materials and finishes
create a smooth, easy-to-use phone that has real visual impact. The spun metal finish of the keypad is designed to gently reflect the light, whilst a blue electro-luminescence panel defines each character and key, creating an unmistakable RAZR V3 signature.

As a result, it lost sight of how technology was evolving, and was extremely late in responding to the transition to the app phone.

First we’ll get the administrative bit out of the way: I could’ve had a 3 hot, 2 not Figure Friday, or put some models that don’t really deserve the spot up, but as I didn’t want to do that, we’ll have to wait for another double-week feature next week. At least there’ll be Figure Monthly somewhere this week, hopefully.

Chasing the money. Click image for source.

That image sums this month up, sadly. I’ve over-spent. Now, now, there was a big convention, but seeing as most I’ve obtained during the convention were books, well, there’s no real excuse. I am accepting donations
I might get you some loot shots, if enough people will ask for them.
Read on for the lengthy endless list of stuff purchased this month.

Books:

• Legend by David Gemmell, the first book in the Drenai cycle. A very solid and enjoyable read. I should write about the similarity and differences between Gemmell’s books and Glen Cook’s.
• Dead Until Dark, the first Sookie Stackhouse book. I’ve seen the first in Hebrew, and number 2-9 in English. Finally found the first in English, sadly with the True Blood cover and not the funky covers of the rest. Anyway, it was a fun read.
• Shining Tears Visual Fan artbook. Won it for $0.01 on eBay.
• Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. Meant to get something of his earlier. Finally got to it.
• The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard. Must I explain this?
• The Orphan’s Tales, both books: In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente. Both seem right up my alley after reading some of Tanith Lee’s Tales of Flat Earth series (splendid!), and they’re illustrated by Michael Kaluta.
• Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow in Hebrew. There was a sale at the warehouse of the publication house, and I’ve read this book over a decade ago. It has a brilliant section on why we all go to hell when we die, even the good ones (but we don’t all get tormented, mind).
• Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley in Hebrew. From the same sale. I read this as well years ago, and turns out there’s a third book in the series, but they didn’t have the second, which I remember to not have been as good as the first anyway. Zelazny is my favourite author, for the record.
• Ordered Megami Magazine volume 114 from HLJ. After seeing Optic’s overview, and seeing the Saber and Rin pencil board, I HAD to get it. Was sad they didn’t have Megumi Creators (14?), as it’d have cut down on shipping costs.
• I did not get this yet, but I’m considering getting Newtype’s August magazine, which has a cute figure of Mari Illustrious. I said to myself it’s not worth it because I’ll have to pay double MSRP, but then again, I have to do the same when ordering from HLJ. Still considering.

Figures:

• Moved Saber Lily Nendoroid order to HLJ, paid for it, and received it. Beautiful figure, caused me some agitation when the rod for her base snapped. You’ll hear more about this at length…
• Received Kotokubiya’s Air from Play-Asia on the first of the month, the review photoshoot is long done. Maybe a post this week?
• Pre-ordered the Megurine Luka nendoroid on Otacute. Since you can’t cancel pre-orders there, I guess it’s as good as “purchased”. It was “Reservation closed” elsewhere.
• Cancelled the pre-orders of Figma Aegis and Plugsuit Ayanami Rei by WAVE. I’ll try to get them later.
• I got some superglue of an average quality to fix Saber Lily Nendoroid. I’m going to put it here. I still didn’t get my exceptional superglue from the eBay purchase, and I couldn’t stand her being so sad.
• My cousin gave me Cloud Strife Action Figure that he had lying about.

Miniatures:

• On a 20% discount sale, and due to USD to Pound conversion rates, finally purchased a Legion of Everblight Striders unit from Maelstrom (free international shipping for orders over 10 pounds!).
• Got a second unit of the Skorne Paingiver Beast Handlers from the same sale. Cheap and useful.
• Paints
• From eBay: Skorne Cyclops Shaman Warbeast(let’s just hope all these things remain useful in the new edition coming out November 24th, so I’m mostly gaining first copies of more stuff, in order to be better prepared).
• Skorne Void Spirit solo.
• Second copy of the Extoller Soulward solo for Skorne, really hope it remains useful in Mark 2.
• 2 soldiers for the Skorne’s Venators. Don’t have a full unit, yet.
• Skorne Epic Warlock Lord Assassin Morghoul, which kicks ass, unlike his normal version.
• A bunch of paints and a paintbrush from the Maelstrom sale. Mostly washes to complete my collection.
• I wanted to resume painting my miniatures this week, but it turns out all of my superglue went bad. So I hopped on eBay and got some more Zap-a-gap. The local superglue is considerably weaker, and I’m not fond of pinning my models otherwise.

Miscellaneous:

• Bought a new fan for my computer. You can hear it, somewhat, but at least it cools things off. You can read more about the situation that was in this post.
• A friend gave me 2G of RAM, for free. That was awesome. Said friend and another also helped with computer maintenance, which was even better.
• The Cities and Knights add-on for the Settlers of Catan board-game (see my review of the main game). This was technically purchased by my mother for herself, and the house.
• I got a new chair. ZOMG. It feels like home, sitting on this chair. This definitely deserves a new post. Also, seeing how much I sit on my chair, it’s probably the most important purchase I’ve made this year. It’s an Israeli made chair, and the company’s site doesn’t have a link to the model I have.
• 100 “Backer Boards” by Comic Defender, so I could organize my whole collection and keep my comics in a good condition.
• A lovely art-piece by a local artist, at the convention. Was pretty cheap, should’ve bought more. Will scan/take a photograph it later.

Total money spent: Half a bajillion over my self-imposed limit. Need to learn better restraint.

I’m wondering if the figures I want deserve a post on their own. But Alter’s version of Yagyu Jubei from Ryakka Hyoran is definitely on the list. HLJ and HS have it out of stock. Also talked to Joseph Tsai of TokyoHunter a bit about the Saber Alter Maid. I’ll probably get some figure really soon, but I can’t get them all, or even close…
I’m really fond of Saber Lily Distant Avalon, Saber Alter Maid is hot (and the puchi is adorable!), and the more I look at Yagyu Jubei the more I like her… and Figma Reimu is probably something I’ll get as well. A good thing she’s not a real exclusive.

Another question, should I review my experiences of purchasing from different online vendors?

Lately I’ve encountered a lot of capitalization distinctions–realist and Realist, deaf and Deaf, romantic and Romantic.  Generally it seems that such variation is intended to distinguish between simple description and self-consciousness.  So, for instance, deaf is a physical condition and Deaf is a cultural movement.  If this is the case, then it seems to me that a distinction between reading and Reading might be appropriate.  The act of interpreting collections of written words, reading with a lower-case r, involves road signs and menus, dull essays and romance novels.  Anything can be read, and all literate people read.  On the other hand, I suppose some people can go their whole lives without Reading.  Reading, at least in my estimation, involves a conscious settling of oneself with a book and a focusing of the whole attention on the song of its language and pulse of its narrative.  It’s about the way the volume smells and feels in your hands–the reason I am so picky about the physical characteristics of my books.  The same novel that I might read in the noisy breakroom at work I would Read later that same night with a blanket and a glass of wine in a quiet room.  It’s as close to a religious sort of experience as I get these days.

I began to think of all this an hour ago when I went to brush my teeth because I could not settle down to Read with hints of cheesecake lingering in my mouth.  I realized that when I’m angry at myself for something–when I’ve been lazy or self-indulgent or childish–I never feel like Reading.  While Reading helps to cope with a lot of external things, like stress or loneliness or disappointment, I don’t turn to books when I’m disappointed in myself.  It’s almost like I have to be pure to be worthy of the experience.  It’s all a bit ridiculous, but then, religious-type things usually are.  Anyway, I’m glad I learned to Read when I learned to read, and I’m glad that unlike the child-arts of makebelieve and self-confidence, Reading is a skill for which I haven’t lost my edge.

there’s no avoiding the promotion of “where the wild things are”, but i’m most excited for the faux-fur covered edition of Dave Eggers’ book adaptation of the flick.

New Yorker interview with Eggers on “max at sea”

available via:

http://www.artbook.com/3882439335.html

Are you a book lover? A bibliophile? Do you get no greater joy out of life than browsing a used bookstore? Do your knees get weak at the thought of a library book sale?

Have you been to Paris yet?

The Parisiens know books, appreciate books. You’ve probably seen the pictures of the book stalls that line the Seine, in their ubiquitous green carts. These are les bouquinistes, the legendary booksellers of Paris:

They are part of the Paris legend. 217 booksellers spread out their 900 stands along the capital’s 11 quays, which represent a three kilometer walk. The onlookers pass by their sides, rummage through the famous green boxes, buy a book here and there, a poster, a vintage print. But who are these men and women who brave the wind, the cold and the rain? Winter is here, but they are still at the task. Enter into the biggest outdoor bookstore.

The quote above is a translation of an audio piece from La Guinguette — a very good online French journal. I want to put a plug in for them, as they have great products, and the audio is free to listen to. (You can download it if you subscribe.)

This article is a great example. this is not French for the beginner, instead it is the French as it is spoken in the streets. Read this article in the English translation, but also play it, to get the ambient sound of the Paris streets as bouquinistes are interviewed at their stalls.

I can almost picture where each stall is, as it’s described in the article. On our honeymoon, we rented an apartment next to the Seine, on the rive gauche, with green stalls outside our door…

And the French are wonderfully book mad. Here’s a picture of me paying 2 euro for a book at a vending machine:

Another way to access books!

“The idea that books had stories associated with them that had nothing to do with the stories inside them was new to us. We had always valued the history, the world of ideas contained between the covers of a book or, as in the case of The Night Visitor, some special personal significance. Now, for the first time, we began to appreciate that there was a history and a world of ideas embodied by the books themselves.”

A few months ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone’s Slightly Chipped, which weaves anecdotes of their book collecting experience with stories about authors, their books, and the art of collecting them. Feeling the need for some nonfiction I turned to their first book, Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World.

Here the couple, lifelong literature lovers, share their gradual introduction the world of collecting. It begins with the shift from new books to those at used stores, then the friendly lessons from those around them on topics such as first editions, dust jackets, and points of issue. They share the first time they paid more than ten dollars for a used book, and their shock the first time they paid more than a hundred. Most importantly, though, they share the true value of books through personal experience.

The Goldstones are appealing to me primarily because they view books as treasures rather than commodities. A nineteenth century Dickens volume is meaningful because of the artistry of the binding, and the history of all the people it has been passed though. But a beat-up short story collection they first read at an inn while on vacation has worth too, because of the personal memories. In the end, their ultimate goal is a physical book they can love just as much as the words inside.

Personally I don’t collect valuable books (mostly for financial reasons), even though I love reading about them and I love old books in general. But already knowing some of the “facts” about collecting in no way lessened my enjoyment; the knowledge is shared a little at a time and mostly through examples. In some ways this makes reading Used and Rare a vicarious experience. As the Goldstones describe all the unique books they have seen in others’ collections, like the copy of Davenant’s works Melville annotated when writing Moby Dick, it’s almost as if we too are witnessing these volumes.

I loved all the trivia the Goldstones share about various books and authors, and kept bookmarking things to mention. For example, to this day (or at least 1995) no one knows the true identity of B. Traven, who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Fitzgerald added the famous billboard to The Great Gatsby only after seeing the cover proof, and dictated that that image should appear on every single edition of the book. Edith Wharton was once a more popular author with book clubs than Jane Austen. (If that had stayed true, would we now have House of Mirth and Zombies…?) And influential horror writer H.P. Lovecraft had virtually no one interested in his work until after he died. (Lovecraft was mentioned in a SAT passage where I tutor, and I was pleased to find out more about him here).

I believe the Goldstones have written at least one more volume on book collecting, but as much as I look forward to it I’ll savor it more if I wait a bit.

I like to read.  I’m not a cultured or sophisticated reader–I don’t make much of an effort to absorb what I can from a book, ruminate on its personal and universal meanings, and tuck such knowledge away for future use.  AP Lit senior year of high school ruined any analytic impulse I may have had (your grade suffered if your argument didn’t match the teacher’s personal opinion).  That said, I’ve always been a pretty concrete, literal thinker.  When I was the only person in my eighth grade class who had read Animal Farm, my teacher asked what I had thought of what was apparently an obvious metaphor.  I had no idea what she was talking about, so I said something about being sad when the horse was sent to the glue factory.  Seriously.

So, I read a good deal.  I can be voracious in my consumption of books when I find something interesting (and preferably easy) to read.  I’m kind of like a locust–read, read, read!, then move on to the next fresh book.  I’ve been struggling to find good books in Singapore.  I brought a lot of books (over a dozen) with me, but it’s felt like a chore to read many of them (like I really should read this random saint’s book, but I don’t really want to).  I’ve splurged at a few book stores, but I tend to buy more “should reads” than “would-like-to reads.”  (It didn’t help that the cheapest books, by far, in one of the stores were the classics.  I wound up buying some obscure Dickens books because I’d already read the fun classics.  Whatever.)

A few weeks ago, I bought The Last King of Scotland, by Giles Foden.  (As I typed the author’s name, I remembered my friend/elementary school classmate who was also named Giles.  He was really good at art and he had an unusually high-pitched voice for a boy.  That is all I remember about him.)  It was made into a movie a few years ago; I have seen the movie, but don’t remember much about it.  I did remember that James McAvoy played a physician who becomes the personal physician to Forest Whitaker’s Ugandan dictator.  I thought the story was nonfiction, that a random Scottish physician had wound up an intimate of a chaotic dictator.  Oops.  I can’t really explain it, but I was disappointed to learn the story is fictional.  As if the story is more impressive if the stars and planets aligned to yield an unlikely narrative.

Still, I find myself increasingly drawn to the book.  I find myself wishing I could sneak away with the book during the hour or so after morning work is done before lunch.  Unfortunately, I still feel paranoid that people are going to accuse me of not working enough, even though my license, clearance, etc. still don’t allow me to work.  I feel like it would be a rude affront to all my peers who are working their butts off if I sat in a public space leisurely reading a book.

There have been a few bits thus far where Foden seems to be trying a bit hard to convince his readers that the protagonist/narrator is a doctor.  At one point, when the narrator is contemplating his own body, he considers his “sharp iliac crests–those pelvic bones above the thigh.”  Um, none of my physician friends talk like that.

Iliac crests: awwwwwww, yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah.

Overall, though, I like Foden’s writing.  I also like that the narrator, like me, is in a foreign country.  The narrator takes the reader through the highs and lows of being in a new place.  He writes of the utter wonder at experiencing a novel landscape, the childlike urge to take it all in…

I stood there–in that evening air, in that coming primal light of ancient stars–and listened to the crickets and the bullfrogs as they sang in their peculiar counterpoint.  Looking over the valley, which seemed as if it might go on for ever, I spied out the land, taking possession in my head of the darkening papyrus swamps, the slopes dotted with banana and coffee, and the brown smudge of the Rwizi River–and I felt wonderful.

There have been several passages that have been breathtaking.  Awesomely enough, I didn’t keep track of those passages (I didn’t know I’d be writing about this until I began this post several minutes ago–awesome!).

Foder’s writing can also be charming in its mundaneness.  At the risk of disappointing my mom a bit, here Foder’s narrator encounters a cockroach on his first night in Uganda (SOUND FAMILIAR?!?!?!?!):

I smiled to myself…and eventually dozed off into a reasonably peaceful sleep.  Or so I thought.  Later, in the early hours, waking with a full bladder of Pilsner, I turned on the light once more.  On top of my big white alarm clock sat a cockroach bigger than any I’d seen, waving its antennae and eyeing me speculatively.  I knocked it to the floor and whacked it with the guidebook.

The cracking of its carcass gave out a loud report.  Pulling on a shoe, I toed the yellow mess towards a corner….Disgusted but triumphant, I finally lay back down confident that the revolting trophy in the corner–like the jackdaws, jays and stoats that Scottish gamekeepers hang on barbed-wire fences–ward off the others.

That was almost my exact first night in my apartment!  I woke up to go to the bathroom (no Pilsner involved, though) and naively went into the kitchen, seeing a dozen cockroaches scatter when I turned on the light.  Disgusting. I used basically anything at my disposal–the table, the detergent bottle–to kill them.  Then I left their carcasses on the floor well into the next day.  I did so, in part, because the idea of cleaning them up was disgusting, but I also left them with the thought that they would warn other cockroaches to stay away.  (No, it didn’t work.)