Additions to Esther

Oh blimey, I barely remember Esther so this made very little sense to me. I felt sorry for the blameless eunuchs who get strangled, they seem to have copped some bad breaks in life.

Judith

The first half describes a period of warfare in unnecessary detail, although it makes a change God to be defending his own people rather than inflicting aggression on others.

Then Judith appears, and is shown to be truly a kickass Hebrew widow heroine for our times when she seduces the enemy leader, gets him pissed, decapitates him and sticks his head on a pole. You go girl.

Tobit

This feels like a throwback to some of the more narrative stuff in Exodus, in particular all that business involving a technicolour dreamcoat. There’s a proper story with murder, marriage and the gall bladder of a fish all featuring.

With some notable exceptions there’s even some usable moral teaching here. Chapter 4 is all great stuff about giving wealth to the needy according to your means and I liked the pithy “they that sin are enemies to their own life” (12:10).

If this was in the OT, I reckon it would be a staple of school assemblies everywhere.

The Brothers Rico – Georges Simenon

I’ve never read a Simenon set outside of France before, so this muscular crime tale set among the Florida mob has a curiosity value. It’s a sharp, entertaining story with a surprisingly effective emotional pay-off.

The Book of Evidence – John Banville

I have a fondness for books narrated by sinister, untrustworthy blackguards; think John Lanchester’s The Debt To Pleasure, or the granddaddy of them all, Lolita. Banville is a stunning writer, and this is a worthy addition to the genre, if slightly slender of plot.

2 Esdras

God is very chatty in this one, and there is a startling but garbled prophecy where God talks about his son Jesus Christ coming down, living for 400 years and then the world ending. Is the disparity with the gospels the reason that Esdras is stuck in the Apocrypha, I wonder?

Of course the alternative reason could be the genocidal mania and the batty stuff about three-headed eagles, a “Sodomitish sea” (5:7) and the suggestion that “menstruous women shall bring forth monsters” (5:8). Although such loopiness didn’t disqualify some of the other books, I suppose.

Metamorphoses – Ovid

I ordered this from a bookshop not realising that Penguin use the Golding translation that was so influential on Shakespeare rather than a modern version, so I ended up reading a 16th Century academic translating a 1st Century, 500 page poem. Not the lightest read of my life, but I’ve had worse.

It’s a kind of Greco-Roman mythology greatest hits album, taking us from the creation to Julius Caesar via Perseus, Daedalus, Orpheus, Achilles and the rest. There’s a lot of material to enjoy, and it canters along nicely.

I was struck by the way that the pre-Christian moral framework values achievement and passion over more contemporary “heroic” values such as defending the weak.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Remember the movie? It won a lot of praise back in 2002 and I remember liking it at the time, but it doesn’t seem to have much of an afterlife. It had Stephen Dillane and Julianne Moore in, actors of which I invariably approve. The blessed Meryl is in it too, which made the bit in the book where the character she plays sees Meryl Streep making a movie somewhat dizzying.

The book is better than the film. The writing is really strong, the three strands of plot resonate intelligently and movingly, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

(500th post! Phew!)

City Secrets: books, the essential insider’s guide – Mark Strand (ed.)

Weirdly included in a series of travel books, this is a collection of "overlooked" books as recommended by a selection of publishers, booksellers and general literary types. I had a lot of fun going through with a pencil behind my ear and keeping track of the following;

Books I Have Read
Coming Through The Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje
A Dance To The Music of Time – Anthony Powell
The Elected Member – Bernice Reubens
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake
Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Pursuit of Love – Nancy Mitford
The Warden – Anthony Trollope
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Books I Want To Read
The Burnt Orange Heresy – Charles Willeford
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept – Elizabeth Smart
Closely Watched Trains – Bohumil Hrabal
Diary of a Provincial Lady – E.M. Delafield
The Disenchanted – Bud Schulberg
Gogol’s Wife and other stories – Tommaso Landolfi
Inventor of the Disposable Culture: King Camp Gillette 1855-1932 – Tim Dowling
A Mathematician’s Apology – GH Hardy
McTeague – Frank Norris
A Month in the Country – JL Carr
Traps – Friedrich Durrenmatt
True Tales from the annals of Crime and Rascality – Saint Clair McKelway
Additional Dialogue: The Letters Of Dalton Trumbo

Books I Already Have But Haven't Got Around To Yet
The Violins of Saint-Jacques: A Tale of the Antilles - Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Sword of Honour Trilogy – Evelyn Waugh
What A Carve Up! – Jonathon Coe

Esdras 1

And so to the Apocrypha, the various non-canonical books of the Bible that are nevertheless included in the King James. Hopefully this will include stuff that is too batshit crazy for the OT. Coz that would be really batshit crazy.

This is kind of a book-keeping affair with lots of dull lists and nothing of particular interest.

Black Mischief - Evelyn Waugh

Hmm, one can see why this early Waugh is not so widely read as his other stuff. The depiction of Africa is problematic, as in the case of a running gag involving a woman named Black Bitch. Still, the white characters are at least as subject to ridicule as the black ones, and there is some funny stuff here.

Malachi

The last book of the Old Testament provides a pretty limp finish except for the amusing bit where God gets tetchy about his worshippers not coughing up their tithes.

The OT as a whole has some amazing stories and poetry, butI find it impossible to understand how anybody could admire yet alone worship this deity once they have actually read the book which they are supposed to revere. Having waded through rivers of blood to get to this point, it seems apt to quote a celebrated and undeniably true bit from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully

Zechariah

The visions of Zechariah are pretty mild compared to some of his fellow prophets, just some regulation rape and destruction to keep things ticking over as the OT nears its conclusion. As usual, the prophecies bearing any coherent meaning at all have yet to come to pass.

The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

This novel has been a huge hit in Australia, possibly thanks to its high-concept sales pitch; at a suburban Melbourne barbecue a naughty child is slapped by an adult who is not his parent. Cue a range of reactions, told through the consecutive narratives of 8 different characters in turn.

I was irritated by the unlikely cultural mix of those attending the occasion, which seemed designed simply to make the author’s job easier. There’s a Greek family, an aboriginal bloke, an Indian woman, a white muslim, a gay boy etc.

The book bends over backwards to establish its specific cultural environment (numerous references to Broken Social Scene CDs, Wild At Heart posters and so on) but I simply didn’t accept that these characters really exist, or at least if they do exist then they don’t hang out together. There is also an irritating tendency to briefly bring up social issues like 9/11 or boat people without any insight at all, seemingly just to give the book a superficially edgy, contemporary feel.

Most egregious, though, is the sexual obsession exhibited by every character here, which gets really tedious. There are multiple sexual couplings, all described in the same flat, mechanical prose that can only remind one of pornography. The only time I laughed while reading The Slap was when, in all seriousness, the phrase “like a jackhammer” cropped up.

I note with relief that this was lost when the 2010 Booker longlist was reduced to a shortlist. Its inclusion would have been an embarrassment.

Small World – David Lodge

What a delight it is to revisit an old favourite and find it as sharp and hilarious as I thought it at my last reading sometime around 1994.

This is a wondrous tale of academics chasing sex and the grail-like UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism in a globe-trotting whirl of international conferences. The plot is a cunning riff on the Romance genre, about which characters pontificate as a kind of commentary within the novel itself.

And it’s really, really funny.

The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy

More contemplative than most of the Hardy with which I am familiar, this nevertheless reprises many of the key Wessex themes, notably the conflict between old ways of life and modernity, and the role of women in reshaping our society. The setting is beautifully evoked, the characters are well realised and the plot works well enough until a slightly clumsy ending. For some reason this isn’t considered one of the author’s major works, but it is masterly stuff.