Home Comforts

Now safely back at the Mansion I can try and hack out the time to get back to some sustained reading. That's not to say the trip to Indonesia allowed me no time at all to read, but what needed to be done precluded serious progress. However, I did finish Dreams From My Father and thoroughly enjoyed it from beginning to end, though I got a bit lost on Obama family history in the final Kenya section. The edition Boon leant me ended with an excerpt from The Audacity of Hope. Unfortunately for the publishers, reading this made me decide I wasn't in any rush to get to grips with the full version. The contrast with the personal poetry of Dreams From My Father was striking. The later book is essentially political rhetoric - very fine, sympathetic rhetoric, but rhetoric nonetheless.

(Isn't it odd? Almost every time I type Dreams From My Father, I don't. It comes out Dreams For My Father. Is some strange Freudian thing going on here?)

Last night, and on the flight back this morning, I made decent in-roads into Praise of Folly. The last time I read it cover to cover was in 1975, and I'm reading the same edition. It smells great. It's the Penguin translation by Betty Radice with an informative introduction by one A.H.T. Levi on the intellectual background of Erasmus. The notes are excellent - making up about a fifth of the text in the Penguin. But the great thing about Erasmus is that you don't have to know what he is writing about to know what he is writing about. Mr Levi seems troubled by the fact that Folly's abundant ironies start to cancel each other out. I think it's wonderful.

I'm also eyeing Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? since I'm in the mood for some comfortable fiction. Mind you, I'm one of those of the opinion that Trollope has more about him than the creation of a delightful version of Victorian England to holiday in. Some of his women make Dickens's ladies look positively soppy. You wouldn't want to get into an argument with a fair number of them. Like life really.