December already?

     

     What Have I been up to for the past month? I've been reading  Edward Abbey: a life by James M. Cahalan. I finally read Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness and The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. Just a taste of Abbey's prodigious output. 

    I have been occupied the past couple of days cataloging my little collection of books on LibraryThing. The site is huge and uses many resources on the Internet. I have found some long forgotten books. Here are a couple:

     Brian Pattern is a Liverpool poet . . .

     My subscription to The Countryman lapsed many years ago but I still have many of the older pocket sized magazines issued when he magazine's home was still on Sheep Street in Burford, Oxfordshire. It's now back in the country in Yorkshire.

Mid-Summer's Day

      I finally, after taking too long to get used to the altitude and dry heat after being in the moist air of England at sea level for the past five weeks or so, feel like posting a picture of the hill again. Culverts and the bridge that carries route 260 over the Little Colorado are being worked on hence the trailers and other works paraphernalia parked by the road.

       Kathy and I have planted a few more herb and vegetable plants and tidied up the yard and gardens a bit. We are fostering a dog for the local voluntary animal rescue.

      I am currently reading Paul: The mind of the Apostle by A.N. Wilson; Robin Hood by J C Holt and Walking English: A Journey in Search of Language by David Crystal.

Another book

I had to browse the bookshop, a book browsers paradise, when visiting Kim Ayres exhibition of portrait photography and this book was sitting on top of a pile. Gripping reading; an excellent companion to Cod.

Alan Villiers remembrance There is a link to a comprehensive bibliography from that page.

From the bookshelves 85

Greek, and occasional Latin, on the verso pages; English on the recto. 

I opened randomly at

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way is an impasse

From the bookshelves 84

     This is number thirteen of The Aperture History of Photography Series. Frank Meadow Sutcliffe is associated with Whitby as Henry Taunt with Oxford.

From the bookshelves 83

     The Folio Society has published two facsimiles of Eric Gill's work:

The Four Gospels
and

Canterbury Tales

Note to self: I lent this book to Charlie A.

From the bookshelves 82

     Smuggling on Chesil Beach in the eighteenth century. Our teacher read this story to us in our last year of primary school.

From the bookshelves 81

     And to continue the theme. If you could travel back in time and meet a child called Adolph Hitler, knowing what he would become, what would you do or say to that child?

From the bookshelves 80

     Am I in a morbid mood? Another book about events which should not be erased from from the collective memory. And yet . . . Pol Pot, Dafur, Sadam, Sarajevo . . . ? Read also: The Periodic Table, If this Is a Man and The Truce.

Listening to the radio

sent me to the bookshelves once again. Michael Horovitz at 75

From the bookshelves 78 and 79

     Soon there will no longer be surviving eyewitnesses to the aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the morning of 6 August 1945 at 08:15.

     Masuji Ibuse's powerful novel was also made into an equally moving film. Do NOT confuse this with the Ridley Scott movie of the same name and released in the same year.

From the bookshelves 77

What is it about Oxford academics writing for children? But this is not a book for children.  It is a dark tale concerning missing pilgrims and an abbot dissecting cadavers in an effort to find the human soul. John Fuller also published quite a few books of poetry. This is a first American edition published by George Braziller in 1984.

Sometimes I sits and thinks . . .

     . . . sometimes I just sits. Here is a blogger, Pranabk in Pune, India, who has been plugging away at this for nearly four years. He is a reader as well.

     And for poetry there's Trinath .

From the bookshelves 76

From the bookshelves 71

    I sat nervously unable to tell the visiting school inspector what badgers ate. Cajole as he might I was unable to answer. "Do they eat toast?", he prompted. I was sure they didn't. I was about seven years old and was going through a period when I was unable to write more than a line or two on any subject even though at that time I was a fidgety chatterbox in class. I'm no longer a chatterbox but getting more than a few lines out of me is a struggle. Look up educate. It is a leading or drawing out . . .               Up and Down in the Dales is Gervase Phinn's fourth autobiographical book

From the bookshelves 70

A book of essays by Guy Davenport worth re-reading.  I  have not read any of Guy's fiction. The title essay of this book begins:

The difference between the Parthenon and the World trade center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination.

The essay's subjects range from Homer to Guy's next-door-neighbour. As a Rhodes Scholar at Merton Guy studied Old English under Professor Tolkien.

From the bookshelves 69

The last six of the Great Ideas series.

From the bookshelves 68

     With an erudite introduction part of which reads:

The reader may have noticed that, until this moment, I have avoided giving a single, comprehensive term to these collective terms. That is because there isn't any. Oddly enough, the compilers of the numerous lists of these words, though obviously enthusiastic philologists, have never felt compelled to settle on a group term for them. The explorer in this field will find these words variouusly referred to as 'nouns of multitude', 'company terms', 'nouns of assemblage', 'collective nouns'*, 'group terms', and 'terms of venery'. This last seems to me best and most appropriate, and itself warrants some explanation. 

* I hold this to be a misnomer since, obviously, it can be confused with the strictly grammatical term referring to such words as 'majority'. The same may be said of 'nouns of multitude'.

From the bookshelves 67

From the bookshelves 65

Six more of the twenty-four paperbacks Penguin published in the Great Ideas series.