I've added another typelist on the sidebar, "Off the Beaten Track". This will list books outside my main interest areas, but which have been worth spending time reading, and thinking about. Once I've read each one I'll try to distill into 200 words what made it a worthwhile read. It's my age I'm sure, lending urgency to hours that increase in value year on year, so if a book I start doesn't grab me by the ankles it's just as likely to be kindly placed in the first charity bag that comes through the letter box.
Some of the best things I've read have been in books that found me, or tugged at my sleeve, or propositioned me at a weak moment, or grabbed me by the ankles on the first page. Gillian Clarke's At the Source, was first heard on Radio 4, and the Welsh National Poet's voice and the beauty of her descriptive prose got me clicking on amazon. Conversations with Chaim Potok, brought me into the company of a novelist I've read repeatedly, but who had remained elusive as a person – he is a fascinating conversationalist on his own novels, which takes a bit of doing. Often the writer isn't the best person to say why you should read their work. Michael Foley's The Age of Absurdity is an impressively wise and shrewd account of our culture's capacity to be blind to our own stupidity. Kathleen Norris wrote Dakota as an account of her own spirituality and gave it the subtitle A Spiritual Geography. This is a hard to pin down book – topography and spirituality, observations on climate and the flora and fauna of the Great Plains, her Benedictine predilections and her work as a poet, a wife and an erstwhile yet persistent Christian, – these are all explored against the landscape of the Midwest. Matthew Guerriri wrote The First Four Notes as a historical investigation into how the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony have captured the imagination and influenced its hearers in literature, history, politics and much else in human reflection and action.
One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was to make sure I read beyond my interests, my competences and my imagined areas of expertise. And I always have – that isn't a self-promoting assertion, more a self-deprecating comment of indebtedness. Because some of the most important thoughts I have thunk, some of the most interesting vistas opened in my mind, some of the more telling criticisms of my too easily arrived at certainties, have come from those "off the beaten track books". I start with Moving to Higher Ground. How Jazz Can Change Your Life, Wynton Marsalis – a book endorsed by the late and wonderful Maya Angelou.
Not sure how long this will run for; in my mother's phrase, used as a slow let-down alternative to a straight 'no', "we'll see"! The photo shows you some of the beauty discovered, the interest provoked, the previously unencountered viewpoints attained, and the different horizons opened up, when you walk off the beaten track and read something just for the Heaven of it.
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