Monday, 5 May 2008

Yet another pleasant day with Jackie tending the garden.

Recent reading (I know you’re interested)

I tried to read H Rider Haggard’s Ayesha - the return of She. In the cheap omnibus edition I have, the pages are mis-collated so although they are numbered sequentially, they are in fact out of order. For a while I was interested to try and find a pattern in the chaos but if such a pattern exists it has escaped me.

I then read Bertrand Russell’s Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. I am sure I should consider further Russell’s musings on the Hierarchy of Languages and the Law of Excluded Middle. But I couldn’t overcome the thought that people have a very commonsense and utilitarian approach to truth: I believe there is no pattern to the mis-collation of pages in Ayesha because I could not find one and I couldn’t be bothered to look further. It was convenient for me to believe this (or at least to act as if I believed it) so I did. But was it true? Who knows? Who cares?

WHG Kingston was a prolific 19th Century author for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and wrote dozens of children’s adventure books to promote and nurture a muscular christianity. On the Banks of the Amazon is the tale of a group of British children travelling alone from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon. My favourite line was: “Sister, hush: I fear you are about to express an opinion; whatever you are about to say it is likely to be wrong.” Lines like this help explain why this book apparently changes hands for $50 on Amazon.

Occasionally I am attracted to books because of their title: recently for example I narrowly resisted a children’s book called The Day My Bum Went Psycho. I was drawn to Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann solely because of the title. But it is a superb book - very thoughtful and courageous. I do recommend it.

Julian Barnes's Arthur and George is another one of those "imagined histories" I find so infuriating. Of its type it is very good, but I must stop reading this particular genre.