Words! Words! Words!

Which book have you bought most? For the majority of the population this is surely a nonsensical question: you buy or acquire a book, read it and then ignore it, or give it to Oxfam or place it in you library. Why would you buy a book again?

There are obviously lots of reasons. My little pocket version of the Oxford English Dictionary accompanied me through school and university, but eventually gave up the ghost through sheer use and had to be replaced when I started teaching. Some books simply explode: something to do with the brittle binding, which can disintegrate with a single reading. My edition of ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke did not survive intact beyond page 393 – and that was just over a third of the way through!

Although I am not inclined to buy a replacement for that book, some of my childhood editions of Great Works have been replaced. A A Milne (one of the great existential writers of the last millennium) has had the honour of his Works being repurchased and one is constantly amazed at how little (really) one has to pay for so much pleasure. Perhaps I am parading my middle class credentials in liking Winnie the Pooh and his ilk, rather than siding with Dorothy Parker (or Constant Reader as she called herself when reviewing books) who, as Marion Meade in her biography of Parker relates, "Constant Reader's best-known review was of A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner. Milne's whimsy had always nauseated her. When she came to the word hummy, her stomach revolted. 'And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings,' she wrote, 'that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.'" I do have sympathy with that response, but I don’t share it.

There are also replacement purchases for those books bought when in school or university which Had To Be Read and which were purchased in the cheapest available paperback. Sometimes in the truly horrible Signet editions which were virtually impossible to open and which were printed with easily smudgeable text. Reading a hefty text in a Signet edition was little short of torture. The pages in the books had to be prised apart and they never lay down, it always needed considerable physical pressure to stop the damn things from snapping shut. So, the completion, in Signet, of a normal brick-like nineteenth century novel was often more physical than intellectual. What pleasure then, to buy a better edition and luxuriate in placid, responsive pages lying calmly for perusal? But that is only buying two copies, who would buy more?

Well, as the British man in the car advert says when he is trying to score points against the French woman’s attempts to show the superiority of her literary culture by using such names as Victor Hugo and Jean Paul Sartre, “Sssssssssssssssakespeare!” I have bought more than two copies of some of his works. Not only do I have multiple copies of the complete works, but I also have numerous copies of some individual plays. Being an English teacher of course, you can always justify the purchase of another copy of ‘Macbeth’ solely because of the different introductions and notes which are contained with the text of the play; and, if you are buying second hand, it becomes more than a pleasure to buy but rather a positive duty! And you do teach the play, so any attempt to increase your knowledge has to be a good thing.

But leaving aside the ‘Desert Island Discs’ staples of The Bible and Shakespeare, what would possess you to buy more than two copies of anything? The answer, of course, is the Missionary Impulse.

Book reading is truly one of the great pleasures. It is a deeply personal pleasure because print can do nothing until your imagination has made something of the individual words and phrases. I have just finished reading ‘The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society’ by Chris Stewart – the third volume of his descriptions of life as a farmer in Las Alpujarras in the south of Spain, which started with his book, ‘Driving Over Lemons.’ Apart from the fact that he and his family are actually living in Spain while for me this is still as aspiration, is a little galling, but his writing style is easy and his descriptions are vivid and engaging. The point though, is that while reading it, I have been sucked into another life and have been in Spain, not Rumney. When quotidian events like phone calls recall me to Wales, I am genuinely disorientated for a moment until I fully realise where I am. The amount of time spent reading is only a few hours, yet the experience gained bears no relationship to that expenditure counted in minutes. This is real time and space travel: both literal and figurative.

With this ‘drug’ so freely available, and in so many flavours, I behave like any normal addict and want to get others hooked as well. What better way than giving free samples to encourage total dependence? I do enjoy giving books as presents: sometimes they are weapons, especially to hardened non-readers; usually, however, they are a sharing of a discovery and a burning desire to have your enthusiasm matched by another.

In this sense I have bought one book more than a few times, one book which has my accolade of being something so special that everyone should have a copy.

Now my enthusiasms have not always been utterly dependable. “Old Saint Paul’s” by William Harrison Ainsworth – an historical novel set during the time of the Great Fire and Great Plague in the seventeenth century in London – was a book given to me my Aunt Bet over forty five years ago (in hardback so it has survived intact!) and cherished by me as a damn good read. It is not to everyone’s taste, but three friends of mine in College read and enjoyed, and each Christmas, as a special treat, we reread the chapter entitled, “What befell Chowles and Judith in the vaults of Saint Faith’s.” Gruesome and vivid and moral as well!

Another recommended book, which I thought was clever, witty, accomplished and of a high intellectual standard was ‘Cards of Identity’ by Nigel Dennis. I read this though the wonderful provision of interesting book by Penguin in the ‘Modern Classics’ series: modern classics usually short with excellent modern art on the covers and usually incomprehensible – at least to the strugglingly ‘intellectual’ school boy that I was then. I recommended this book to all and sundry, telling people that this was the book which I would most like to have written. Then I reread it and panicked, seeing the novel as pretentious, obvious and facile, nothing that I would recommend today. Ah well, put it down to experience.

So, the book that I have bought more than once is a volume which may be surprising given my stated opinions and one with a title which makes it seem like a mixture of ‘I-Spy’ and kiddies book. It’s ‘The Lion Book of Christian Poetry’ compiled by Mary Batchelor and published, amazingly, by Lion. The ISBN is 0 7459 5183 X. It is one of the best anthologies of poetry that I have ever read (though this is the paperback and I have the fuller out of print hardback edition) with one of the most stimulating selections of poetry that you can find. It is divided into sections which are further subdivided. For example the section headed, ‘The Pilgrim’s Way’ is subdivided into sections The Journey; Faith and Doubt; The Struggle of Good and Evil; Sickness and Suffering. This is, obviously, a Christian anthology, but any one of any faith or no faith can respond to the ideas, the passion and the belief in these poems. They are not all classics and not all of them are profound: they are as varied as the experience of Christianity itself.

As a taster I will give you my favourite poem, and the one which I read when looking at this book in the bookshop which persuaded me to buy the book.

AGNOSTICISM
by
John Tatum

It doesn’t come easy.

In spite of it all.
I can’t help pushing open
the doors of country churches;
shoving a coin or two
in the box by the wall,
paying twice over
for the leaflet I take.

It doesn’t come easy.

Wandering among gravestones
is irresistible;
departure is almost
impossible. I delay
It over and over
to hear once more the song of the blackbird.

It doesn’t come easy.

As I race back
into the modern
rationalistic world,
I think of cathedral towns
and country rectories
and gentle rectors’ wives
arranging the flowers.


Well worth buying more than once!