I broke another kind of fast yesterday by buying my first books of this year. To be more precise, I got them using the book tokens I'm given for doing my now annual workshop at the Literature Seminar organised by the Ministry of Education. This year there was a cut-back in the value of said book tokens and I was quite glad of this as I have no great desire to add more books to my over-flowing shelves. (The plan is still to get some sort of e-reader device once I complete the un-read tomes, of which there are still a fair few - with four more now added.) I gave half the tokens to Fifi and Fafa, to match the amount they usually get, so now they are possessed of even more fictive vampires, teenage angst and Nancy Drew mysteries.
My four purchases, in no particular order, were: Richard Wigmore's Faber Pocket Guide - Haydn; The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins; James Shapiro's Contested Will - Who Wrote Shakespeare?; and My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me - forty new Fairy Tales edited by Kate Bernheimer. The last of these I got based on a recommendation by Trebuchet (if I remember rightly), and also influenced by the fact it's got some intriguing names amongst the assmbled writers. I've been looking for a copy for a little while, and it's been a similar story regarding the little Haydn book. I'm not entirely sure why or how but Haydn has come to mean more to me than almost any other composer. When I bung anything by the great man on the turntable it always feels right somehow, but I know next to nothing regarding what the cognoscenti have to say about him, so now I'm going to find out.
The Shapiro was a no-brainer after his 1599, and having read some glowing reviews. And I thought I'd read some of Dawkins doing what he does well to compensate for ploughing through what he does not-so-well. But that's a bit unfair. I didn't really plough through The God Delusion, finding it quite easy to read - but it did irritate due to its limitations. In fact, I've been avoiding picking holes in it since it seems so petty to do so. I'm hoping for something illuminating based on the prof's genuine sense of wonder rather than the dully polemical stuff he sometimes gets bogged down in.
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