5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from author Nicola Griffith, whose gripping novel Always is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
When I read I want to immerse myself in the word world: to taste it, hear it, feel it on my skin. I want the people and places and modes of thought to invade my mirror neurons–to persuade me, just for a while, that this narrative is my lived experience.
I grew up with the notion that ‘escapist’ reading was intellectually inferior to coolly analytical text, but now I’m on the side of Tolkien: those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the jailers. Now I’ll read anything, as long as it’s good, as long as it gives me that sense of multiplication, of time travel and life extension.
1. All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Poetic bricolage brimming with energy. With cinematic jump cuts and scene notes, Logue reimagines the first battle of the Iliad, renaming familiar characters and gleefully mixing imagery that’s historically accurate and wildly anachronistic (arrows carve tunnels through people’s necks the width of a lipstick, Idomeneo would ‘sign a five-war-contract on the nod’). As I read I felt dust gritting under my palms and blood in my mouth. An experience as startling as a flick in the eye.
2. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. in collaboration with Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s American partner). The physical embarrassments of age, memories of cold skin and hot fires of youth, the awfulness of no longer being able to hunt. With brilliant precision, Yourcenar delineates the physical and cultural environment’s influence on character. (For insight into Yourcenar’s life and work, see Joan Acocella’s lovely essay.)
3. A History of the English Church and People by Bede (for maximum culture shock, try the Plummar/Sherley-Price edition with its mind-bogglingly literal mid-twentieth century introduction). Here is an eighth-century English monk inventing the notion of cultural history in the short, snappy one- or two-page chapters I thought had been first used by twentieth-century bestsellers. Now I’m wriggling with excitment at the imminent arrival on my doorstep of a new complete translation of the 20-book The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated by Barney, Lewis, Beach, and Berghof. This was the Wikipedia of Bede’s time–his version of time travel. Want to know why architects used green Carystean marble to panel libraries, or whether amber is born of the sap of poplar or pine? Look no further.
4. The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. The first book, Master and Commander, is essentially the opening chapter of a 20-volume novel set against the naval engagements of the Napoleonic wars. Jane Austen on a boat. Although the quality dims over the last five volumes, the first fifteen are faultless. I marvel at, to quote A.S. Byatt, O’Brian’s ‘prodigal specificity’, his humane touch, his humor and subtlety, the perfect balance of exuberance and restraint, his unerring eye for the exact word, the comic detail, and his ability to delineate changes in the friendship between two men with the same authority as volatile politics in South America or a brutal cutlass fight. I was utterly swept away by these books, and returned delighted and increased.
5.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. A chapter in the history of a world that never was but should have been. As we travel with hobbits and dwarves we taste elven bread and good honest beer, smell the fumes of Orodruin and the existential rot of the marshes of Mordor. The book is stuffed with satisfactions: hobbit delight in a good snug hole in a sandy bank, dwarfish appreciation of a beautiful cavern, the soul-stirring gallop of the perfect horse. The film adaptation was enormous fun–at times even moving–but it lacked understanding of the Anglo-Saxon burdens of noblesse oblige and elegy which lie at the book’s heart. Journeying with Tolkien in print is stunning; when we get to the end and come back, home looks different.
Archives for August 7, 2007
TT: Almanac
“Only someone who sees other people as having intrinsic value can make friends. This does not mean that his friends will not be of instrumental value. But their instrumental value depends upon the refusal to pursue it. The use of friends is available only to those who do not seek it. Those who collect friends for utility’s sake are not collecting friends: they are manipulating people.”
Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged