No more book buying...
This is not because I have rushed out and bought a 'Kindle' (though I am mountingly tempted) or a 'Sony reader' but because slowly I am repatriating books held at my mother's whilst I was in Russia.
Sorting through these yesterday afternoon (and there are several boxes yet to come), I enjoyed my inner ruthlessness in discarding the now unwanted but equally accumulated the long lost and loved and the completely forgotten but compelling, sufficient material for months of diligent exploration.
Whether this will have any impact at all on my book buying habit, we shall have to see but I will not be holding my proverbial breath.
Amongst the long lost category are virtually the complete works of Wendell Berry including both the Collected Poems and 'The Memory of Old Jack'. I consider 'Old Jack' his best novel. Also Kathleen Raine's 'Defending Ancient Springs' - the first volume of her essays I read, and which I want to re-read now especially. This is where I first read of Edwin Muir who became my favourite writer, the one whose vision most closely accords with my own - though now it would be difficult to separate out how much of mine was formed before my acquaintance and how much was shaped after.
Among the completely lost but compelling is Jonathan Bate's biography of the poet John Clare (though his poems have not resurfaced) that remarkable (and tragic) largely self-taught man who sings so hauntingly of place and passing world (and subsequently of his own madness ).
In the out we go box is, I found surprisingly, Rene Girard on religion and violence partly because I feel I have absorbed him in so far as I am ever going to, indebted to insights but not bought on the whole package and because he falls perilously close to the category 'theology' to which I have developed a comprehensive allergy (though I can cope happily with books of and in the religious space, something about the 'narrower' version that is theology I cannot live with, it has gone the way of psychotherapy, systems of thought that my own wholly unsystematic, story led brain no longer even pretends to enjoy.
Sorting through these yesterday afternoon (and there are several boxes yet to come), I enjoyed my inner ruthlessness in discarding the now unwanted but equally accumulated the long lost and loved and the completely forgotten but compelling, sufficient material for months of diligent exploration.
Whether this will have any impact at all on my book buying habit, we shall have to see but I will not be holding my proverbial breath.
Amongst the long lost category are virtually the complete works of Wendell Berry including both the Collected Poems and 'The Memory of Old Jack'. I consider 'Old Jack' his best novel. Also Kathleen Raine's 'Defending Ancient Springs' - the first volume of her essays I read, and which I want to re-read now especially. This is where I first read of Edwin Muir who became my favourite writer, the one whose vision most closely accords with my own - though now it would be difficult to separate out how much of mine was formed before my acquaintance and how much was shaped after.
Among the completely lost but compelling is Jonathan Bate's biography of the poet John Clare (though his poems have not resurfaced) that remarkable (and tragic) largely self-taught man who sings so hauntingly of place and passing world (and subsequently of his own madness ).
In the out we go box is, I found surprisingly, Rene Girard on religion and violence partly because I feel I have absorbed him in so far as I am ever going to, indebted to insights but not bought on the whole package and because he falls perilously close to the category 'theology' to which I have developed a comprehensive allergy (though I can cope happily with books of and in the religious space, something about the 'narrower' version that is theology I cannot live with, it has gone the way of psychotherapy, systems of thought that my own wholly unsystematic, story led brain no longer even pretends to enjoy.