There is a new bookshelf in my office, placed there in an attempt to stave off melancholy. The top shelf is furnished with books which had fossilised by my bedside — that being a place to which books are often carried and only removed when I can’t see the floor. From Left to right. the top shelf reads:
- Mary Kenny: Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
- Kotre: White Gloves (a book on senility and memory)
- Terence Deacon: The Symbolic Species
- Naomi Baron: Computer Languages, a guide for the perplexed
- A Member of the Aristocracy: Manners and Rules of Polite Society (1928: 14th edition)
- Susan Richards: Epics of everyday life
- Harry Potter: Hanging in Judgement (the death penalty, by a chaplain at Wormwood Scrubs)
- Robert Eisenmann: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians
- George Steiner: Grammars of Creation
- John D Macdonald: The Green Ripper
- Wilmut/Campbell/Tudge: The Second Creation
- John Gierach: Even Brook Trout get the Blues
- Garry Trudeau: He’s never heard of you, either (Doonesbury covering the 1980 election)
- Michael Walsh: John Paul II
- Neal Ascherson: Stone voices
- Andrew Brown: In the beginning was the Worm (the beautiful American hardback)
- Jack Vance: Cugel’s Saga
- Conor Cruise O’Brien: States of Ireland
- Putnam: Making Democracy Work
- Irenaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt: The biology of Peace and War
- Alison Jolly: Lucy’s Legacy
- DBC Pierre: Vernon God LIttle (from the goody bag at a Guardian books party)
- Frank Sawyer: Keeper of the stream
- Samuel Johnson: Lives of the Poets, vol 1
- Yellow Pages Guide: London Street Atlas.
melancholy continues to impend but at least typing this list did not entail thinking about religion.
Instant, cheap analysis: this guy loves reading (lots of bedside books), but reads because he feels he has to (all those heavy tomes about Science and Religion!) The one novel is a freebie (and one I’m avoiding because it sounds too depressing for words). I prescribe a good dose of fiction. Twenty minutes to be taken tridue, curled up in a favourite chair with a large glass of something comforting.
you really should read The Green Ripper by McDonald. It is one of his best books and was made into a decent movie…. McDonald was wayyyyyy ahead of his time…..
Oh, I’ve read everything on that shelf (I did skip the A-Z) except the the eibl-eibesfeldt, which is a library book, VGL, which I will sell, and the symbolic species, which I will take on holiday.
I keep meaning to write a long post on the excellence of John D Macdonald. I reviewed his last book (Barrier Island) for the Indie and when he died wrote an obituary in the style of Travis McGee. I wonder what happened to that.