Category: Confessions of a Bibliophile

One of my friends doesn’t read novels. Why read about something that never happened, he asks? His preferred reading is history and biography, trying to understand the world and human behaviour by understanding the lives and times, the struggles and realities, of people in other places, at other times. However that only works if it is good history and good biography. Leaving aside whether anyone can or should write objective, impartial history – and whether even if possible, that would give us more insight than the passionately told narrative of what ‘happened’, the truth is,good history, good biography and a good novel are each capable of deepening our understanding, broadening our sympathy, stretching our imagination, sharpening our moral understanding, and extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

I am an unembarrassed novel reader. Literature of the imagination, stories that grow out of the rich loam of human relationships, excursions into other times and places and lives, enable us to enter worlds otherwise inaccessible, and to observe and consider what other people’s lives, (and perhaps our own) are about. I used the word ‘good’ – not exactly a term of academic precision, thank goodness! Novel reading for me has nothing to do with analytic literary deconstruction – a good novel is capable of doing for us some of the work mentioned above:

deepening our understanding,

broadening our sympathy,

stretching our imagination,

sharpening our moral understanding,

extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

Limiting myself to just one book by some of my favourite authors, here is a list of good novels that I’ve read more than once.

The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

The Deptford Trilogy, Robertson Davies

The Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler

A Burnt Out Case, Graham Greene

Father Melancholy’s Daughter / Evensong, Gail Godwin

Grace Notes, Bernard MacLaverty

An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

Unless, Carol Shields

Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

“Dreams, books, are each a world;

and books, we know,

are a substantial world,

both pure and good. Round these,

with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.” (Wordsworth)

Margaret (an education and motivation for learning specialist) is wondering about the different ways of reading we have all developed. She is especially intrigued by how some people (me included) read several books at once – not all together, but moving from one to the other and back again. It’s an interesting question(s) – how do we read and why do we read as we do? Thinking about it, I do usually have several books going at the same time, but that can be governed by a number of considerations.

I have set times in the day when I am likely to be reading – they aren’t the only times I read, but reading is about the only thing I do at those times. Those who observe the details of my blog have noticed the early posting times – I’ve even had a row for it from Graeme. But because my mind is active and alert early, for an hour in the morning I tackle the substantial book on my desk. Substantial means intellectually demanding, taking me to new ideas, challenging my comfortable assumptions. That’s when I’m reading John Swinton’s, Raging with Compassion, at present for example. So I always have an early morning brain workout!

Alongside that I’m likely to be reading at least a couple more. Functional reading for my teaching is mostly done throughout the week at times wrestled free of other responsibilities that can often seem more ‘essential’ than the reading that informs a lecture and keeps it current. Currently Migliore’s Faith Seeking Understanding, Joy Macdougall’s book on Moltmann (on sidebar), and a couple of Galatians commentaries, are lifted and laid around my desk.

If I’m writing something, then material is chosen by the subject and the reading clusters around the writing time – whenever that too can be extracted from the routine of academic admin and teaching. Recently baptist stuff (small b in deference to Stuart) and George Macleod have cluttered my desk.

Novels,( a good murder story – Henning Mankell just finished), poetry, biography (and philosophy I’m afraid) and other reading-what-I-like-when-I-feel-like-it, type books is usually at night -often the book preferred to the telly. Not always though – I can’t read a book and watch the telly. I have a friend whose daughter can read a book, watch the telly and listen to her Ipod without blowing any mental fuses! And for as long as I remember I’ve read in bed – but I am getting more and more like those dolls whose eyes are weighted to close as soon as they lie flat!

Now all that said – the question of how you read several books at once isn’t really answered. It probably isn’t timetable or routine or technique that’s the main issue – but the way different minds work. Some folk simply don’t move easily in and out of alternative worlds of fiction, biography, history, theology, poetry, psychology or whatever our different interests are. Concentration and afterthought aren’t easily preserved if too many things are going on at once, and there can be a feeling of superficial non-engagement:

The elephant is a bonnie bird

it flits from bough to bough

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

So is it a habit that can be learned; or a difference in how our minds process and assimilate what we read?

Who retains most – the one book at a time reader, or the several on the go at once reader?

What do the rest of you think?

Why do you read as you do?

Are you a one book or a several book reader?

Do you retain what you read and manage to keep the plots / arguments / worlds / of each book separate?

And isn’t the question of purpose important – Why I’m reading what I’m reading – for information, formation, recreation, inspiration?

One closing thought at this stage (cos I’m going to post a bit more on this) – having several books on the go at once, is that a multi-disciplinary way of learning, or is it pretentious dilettantism? Hmm? Come on Jim – own up – how much of that suff actually sticks?

Yesterday sneaked into a second hand bookshop and picked up the Hauerwas Reader in near mint condition for a fiver! Then Barth’s  The Word of God and The Word of Man, for not a lot more, came neatly wrapped in old fashioned brown paper with handwritten name and address. I still like olde worlde courtesies of this London bookseller (Pendlebury’s), in contrast to the 21st C jiffy-bag or cardboard sleeve marketing efficiency of the major online retailers.

Spent ages in Waterstones unable to make up my mind what to do with Waterstone book tokens generously given. Too much choice? Or not in the mood? Or retail paralysis brought on by knowing whatever I choose is already paid for? Needed a latte to ponder profoundly on what might be life-changing options – a soft seat in the gallery, a couple of paperbacks to sip along with the coffee.

Then back to the task of choice. There’s an involuntary inner trembling at the thought that I can have virtually any book in the shop for the asking – and the token of course. Richard Baxter the Puritan once likened heaven to a library where we would learn all the truth of God and ourselves – so to stand in a bookshop and choose books already paid for, is at least to stand just outside the door, of the vestibule, of heaven! So why the uncertainty, the dithering and swithering and browsing?

Norman McCaig’s Collected Poems was a serious temptation and in Scottish vocabulary McCaig would recognise, I ‘swithered’.

But then Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World is another biggie that I want to read – few people grasp better, the macro-issues of 21st century global power plays.

Or a superb photographic celebration of Antarctica – coffee table size so long as it’s a big coffee table!

So after all that I came away to think about it – when I have book tokens for a specific shop that ain’t theological, then I don’t buy theological. There’s only so much theology any person needs, and can read – anyway some of the best theological reflection isn’t found in theology books…but in poetry, history, natural history, in fact, books like the ones I mentioned above and can’t make up my mind about.

There’s a whole different take on God, life, love, morality, human relationships, in novels,(narrative theology?) travel books,(life as pilgrimage – journey?) biographies,(lived commitments). So no rush – well, no immediate rush – that is, I can wait another day… or two…, I think.

On the radio the other day a long debate about the cost of removing spat out chewing gum from Glasgow’s pavements (about £2 per paving stone!) – reminded me of the complaint by the American critic Elbert Hubbard:

This will never be a civilised country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Most of my life I’ve been doing my bit for civilisation – buying loadsa books, and not spitting out chewing gum!

To Buy or not?

Well, Graeme Clark came into College waving this book around, enthusing about it. I scanned the chapters, browsed around the contents page and read the various commendations and publisher’s blurb – all of whom warn that my education would be sadly deficient, and my perspectives seriously skewed, and my ability to sound well informed in any half serious theological discussion significantrly diminished if I didn’t get this book. Such publisher’s blurb and pundit commendations are part of a marketing strategy to hook the gullible. Who said the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary? Course it is. I checked! Book ordered!

As promised – only 100 words on why I want to buy and read this:

Scotland’s role in the slave trade has two contradictory sides. Glasgow streets, commemorating tobacco lords (Glassford, Ingram, Buchanan) highlight the vast commercial benefits derived from tobacco. Likewise West Indies islands such as Virginia, Jamaica and Tobago. 

I am ashamed of this history of complicity.

But there’s another side, represented by campaigners and protesters like Zachary Macaulay. Tireless fighters confronting powerful vested interests, excoriating politically expedient rationales, lambasting their ethical emptiness, exposing the theological scandal of a so-called Christian nation founding prosperity on oppression. 

I am proud of this history of dissent.

Ashamed – proud – I need to understand both sides.

We live in the universe of His knowing, in the glory of attachment. "before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer.1.5). This is the task: to sense or to discover our being known. We approach Him, not by making Him the object of our thinking, but by discovering ourselves as the objects of His thinking.      A. J Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1962). First Edition.

Long before Christmas I ordered this volume of Heschel’s magnum opus. It arrived today. It’s a 1962 first edition, handsomely bound, read but cared for, with a gold leafed postage stamp label indicating the seller was Kieffer’s Jewish Bookstore, Chicago. The publisher, The Burning Bush Press only printed quality Jewish publications. It’s a booklover’s book and I’m glad it found me!

I hope some time to write a personal appreciation of this profound and revered Jewish thinker who has taught me so much about prayer, about God’s holiness, and about the lovingkindness that called creation into being and has not abandoned it. His influence was decisive on Christians of such varied backgrounds and such similar calibre as Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Jurgen Moltmann and Walter Brueggemann. He was a substantial presence in the civil rights movement, and as a critic of Vatican II’s caginess about acknowledging the incipient, at times overtly hostile, anti-semitism in much of Christian history. His exposition of the pathos of God in this volume on the prophets was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, and is one of the most telling contributions to religious thinking in the 20th century.

I love books. I enjoy handling a beautifully made book. I delight in the heft and feel and smell of a new, good quality, hardback. There is an aesthetic in bookbinding, in page design, choice of font, type of paper. Those who predict the demise of the book make me nervous and anxious in case they are right- maybe I am stockpiling against the day!

Books have made my own journey with God more informative and formative, with interesting intersections where my mind has met another – and when truth, wisdom, beauty, insight, knowledge have often been the consequence of the meeting. I am deeply grateful for the silent conversations I have had. I have a note of every book I’ve read in the past 30 years – and of most of the ones I’ve bought. Mind you I offload books too – I’ve no interest in mere accumulation. If push came to shove I could get by on a select, rather than a comprehensive bibliography from my library.

However, as a half-way responsible bibliophile I am increasingly aware of the ecological cost of paper, printing and marketing of books. I can recite most of the excuses and rationalisations others make, and can invent a few novel ones of my own. But yes – libraries, trusting friends, used books, charity shops, these all help through cumulative use and recycling- though I already do these. So then we come to the self-denying ordinance – why is another book necessary, and why do I need to possess it? When does a hobby become an obsession, legitimate enjoyment a dependence, fun become compulsion? The full title of the book in this paragraph is Bibliomania, or Book Madness Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms and Cure of this Fatal Disease, Reginald Heber.

So each month I’ll fess up to the next proposed purchase, and display the evidence on the sidebar under ‘confessions of a bibliophile’. I will write no more than a one hundred word post, not to review the recent acquisition, (since I haven’t acquired it yet!) but to justify its purchase. Maybe I can persuade myself not to click on the confirm order button! "Of the making of books there is no end, and much clicking is a weariness of the flesh" – with apologies to The Preacher. The first book to be considered is this one, details on the Confessions sidebar. My justification will be the next Confessions post.