Browsing the bookshelves again 58, 59

To see East Anglia through another's eyes . . . and feel the light; taste the salt air from off the North Sea; Tyne, Dogger, Humber, Thames . . . North Uitsera, South Uitsera (Viking),  Fisher, German Bight . . . a blast of wind from the Baltic . . .

Rima has a link to Kevin Crossley-Holland's website on her sidebar. Mr. Crossley-Holland lives in Norfolk.

James Dodds learned boat-building in Maldon, Essex. 

Reading group

The reading group I belong to has read these books over the last five years:

Love in the Time of Cholera       Gabriel Marquez*

Waiting for the Barbarians          J.M. Coetzee*º

God's Bits of Wood                      Sembene Ousmane

The Cave                                      Jose Saramago*

My Year of Meats                         Ruth Ozeki

Blood Meridian                            Cormac McCarthy~†

End Zone                                      Don Delillo~

The Maltese Falcon                     Dashiell Hammett

The Silent Cry                              Kenzeboro Oe

Under Milkwood                          Dylan Thomas

Lolita                                            Vladimir Nabokov

The Master and Marguerita          Mikhail Bulgakov

The Quiet American                      Graham Greene

The Namesake                               Jhumpa Lahiri†

Black Rain                                     Masugi Ibuse

Henderson the Rain King              Saul Bellow*~†

Miramar                                        Naguib Mahfouz*

Snow                                             Orhan Pamuk*

Free Fall                                       William Golding*º

The Waves                                     Virginia Woolf

Family                                            Pa Chin

As I Lay Dying                               William Faulkner*†~

Ceremony                                       Leslie Marmon Silko

A Confederacy of Dunces              John Kennedy Toole†

The Kite Runner                             Khaled Hosseini

Whose Body?                                  Dorothy L Sayers

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly   Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Known World                          Edward Jones†

Lost City Radio                              Daniel Alarcon

Our Man in Havana                       Graham Greene

The Sirens of Titan                         Kurt Vonnegut

The Brief Wondrous Life of

Oscar Wao                                     Junot Diaz†

Empire Falls                                  Richard Russo†

Silence                                            Shusaka Endo (Tanizaki prize)

A Mercy                                          Toni Morrison

Everything that Rises must

Converge                                        Flannery O'Connor

The Plague of Doves                      Louise Erdrich

Beyond Black                                  Hilary Mantel

*Nobel Prize for Literature
†Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
~National Book Award for Fiction
°Booker Prize for Fiction

 and we'll be discussing Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout next week. I've not read some of the books on the list; and of course I've read others on my own . . .

ADDENDUM: Round Valley Book Group now has a blog

Happy Thanksgiving

     Computer troubles resolved - for the moment.

     Started Tabula Rasa on a whim and was then bereft of ideas.

     Company just arrived to stay over Thanksgiving.

     Kathy had to rush over the hill to Show  Low for an appointment this morning after finding out today is the 24th not the 23rd.

     I may catch up with pictures later. Meanwhile I'll meditate and contemplate that for which I am thankful . . . that I woke up this morning, that I am able to play some music each morning, that I am still relatively sane (relative to what or to whom?)

Meanwhile here's another of Nick Bantock's books from my shelves

The rules of this award-

This award is bestowed on to blogs that are exceedingly charming. Well, I'm not sure about that; but charming enough to attract eight followers

These kind of bloggers aim to find and be friends. I'm tickled pink that others have troubled to comment (or cast a pebble into the puddle  . . . er . . . pond; lake; sea; ocean?)

They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. No, I'm too self absorbed in humble introspection . . .

Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated.

Thank you, Lemon Verbena Lady; I can only reciprocate  . . . but that's already been done.

Please give more attention to these writers:

Dick Glasgow is a very busy and affable fellow and offers a warm welcome to County Antrim and plenty of links to traditional music happenings in his corner of the world.

 Personal poetic expression may be found here.

Duta alread has many acknowledgments of the quality of her contribution to the blogos-sphere.

Because 60 is divisible by 2, 30, 3, 20, 4, 15, 5, 12, 6 and 10 . . . . keeps things neat.

Watch artwork grow at Christine Walker's blog.

And a slice of life called Please and Thank You

 

Codex Sinaiticus

Scholarship . . . conservation . . . history . . . Codex Sinaiticus

     I'm most likely behind the curve (so what else is new?) on this. Brush up your biblical Greek . . .

Open Book

I mentioned Open Book a few posts ago. The vote was counted and the winner is . . . listen here.

Well, that was a gratifying surprise!

They will not grow old . . .

as we who are left grow old.

We will remember them.

I remember Leo Saunders, one of those left who did grow old.

The story so far . . .

     Thinks: to save money on postage and to let friends and family have some idea of what I'm doing in England I'll start a blog. In the process of setting up the account I needed a name. Oh, what the hell: Thrupnybits. (I know, I know, stop sniggering behind your hand there) And a name for the blog? Mmm . . . how pretentious can I be? I don't think I'd browsed many blogs at this time I just jumped in. I can't remember now if I made a list to choose from. Mmmm . . . seeking something . . . how about epistēmē? Mmm . . . how can I have lived through so many years and still not answered the question "who am I?" or kept in mind the adage to 'know thyself'? Should I throw away all the books and start again? Pestered again and again with the question, “What do you want to be (or was it 'do'?) when you grow up?” I have the fuel (fertile? or mere wind-egg?); do I have the fire that consumes? 

     I can only know of my early life from what I have been told and the few pictures of me. I have no memory of that time; I do not have a memory of my sitting looking at the camera, only the memory that I was told this is a picture of me with Mr. Foster. My earliest memories, which are remembered as me being the centre of my universe, occur later as consciousness awakens. I do not have an eidetic memory. What about olfactory or auricular memory? The sense of smell, though the weakest of human senses, holds the key to many early memories: the smell of the kitchen on wash day; mum’s eau-de-cologne; the orangey-whisky-evergreen smell of Christmas at home; to this day I do not like the smell of gin as I took a swig of the stuff from a bottle I thought contained soda water, ugh! Sounds from childhood include the early morning crowing of cocks; the whining hum of the milk float; the swish of cars passing down the High Street; birdsong, particularly summer skylarks and evening blackbirds and thrushes warning ‘tchick’. So, of the first two years or so of my life I have no memory and therefore no knowledge but what I was told. I don’t know what my first words were; I never asked and wasn’t told. Boys are well known for staying mum until they are about three and then spouting complete sentences . . . does that mean by inference I think girls start off babbling and then never stop? I see pictures of me when little and I think I often look slightly puzzled viz:

2+ years old with Mr. Foster, our next-door neighbour, in Kelvedon, 1953.

 

Chaos

     Mmm . . . any books here I'd disown or be ashamed for having on my shelves? Some I've lugged around for nearly forty years . . .

     I did a quick dust but no rearranging . . . I mean organizing. Choking from the smoke  of a prescribed burn gone a bit wild; I think I've been spending too much time in my own company lately . . . I missed all the sensational news about gunmen going berserk . . .

I can't spell . . . Alan, Allan, Allen, Alyn, Alun, Alain . . .

     Well, I just happened to capture a fairly decent  rendition of a couple of traditional tunes I like and play on the hammered dulcimer. Plain vanilla tunes; no embellishment.

     
Jamie Allan was piper to the Countess, later Duchess of Northumberland. I can't do the tune the justice it deserves as it sounds much better on the Northumbrian small pipes .

     Winster Gallop is a traditional English dance tune.

Download Alan - Jamie Allen And Winster Gallop
         

Get Knotted!

     Knowing the difference between a hitch and a bend and learning to splice was all part of Scouting when I was growing up. Making a neat back-splice was satisfying but I didn't get much beyond the basics. Knowing how to make a good long-splice is a valuable skill for one looking after bell ropes. Alas I never went to sea but knowing how to make a proper square knot (or reef knot), make a figure of eight and tie sheet bends the correct way was handy the few times I went sailing with friends in a gaff rigged converted 23' whaler.

From the bookshelves 51, 52

I lived in Venice,CA in the early nineteen-eighties within walking distance of Small Word Books; mind you walking distance for me at that time was anywhere within four or five miles of where I lived. Living in LA and having a street address with fewer than four digits is quite unusual, too.   I digress. I expect it was whilst browsing the Venice bookstore that I found these books by Eva Figes.