Dancing Mad God

Recently, the third and concluding volume of Gladstone’s Homer and the Homeric Age finally made it to Project Gutenberg. The scanned versions available online all failed to include a map which was inserted at the end of the volume, showing Gladstone’s view of Homer’s view of the world. A splendid map it is too:

Obtaining a scan of the map took quite some time, accounting for the delay, but the preparation of the text itself also involved a lot of work from many people. Each page was checked five times to ensure accuracy and to replicate the formatting of the original, and this process also involved transcription of all the Greek, prior to its reconversion to Greek script in the final book. The electronic version incorporates 71 corrections, many of those being Greek typos spotted by the three volunteers who read through the book after I’d finished with it (or thought I had). This number of corrections is more or less typical for a book of this size, so I’m pretty confident our ebooks are more accurate than the original printed versions.

The whole project started with volume 1 in November 2013, after I’d read an account of Gladstone’s weird and wonderful theory of colour in Homer in Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages — one book which I’m still to finish. The theory being, incidentally, that “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age”, due to the lack of colour in their environment:

The olive hue of the skin kept down the play of white and red. The hair tended much more uniformly, than with us, to darkness. The sense of colour was less exercised by the culture of flowers. The sun sooner changed the spring-greens of the earth into brown. Glass, one of our instruments of instruction, did not exist. The rainbow would much more rarely meet the view. The art of painting was wholly, and that of dyeing was almost, unknown; and we may estimate the importance of this element of the case by recollecting how much, with the advance of chemistry, the taste of this country in colour has improved within the last twenty years. The artificial colours, with which the human eye was conversant, were chiefly the ill-defined, and anything but full-bodied, tints of metals. The materials, therefore, for a system of colour did not offer themselves to Homer’s vision as they do to ours. Particular colours were indeed exhibited in rare beauty, as the blue of the sea and of the sky. Yet these colours were, so to speak, isolated fragments; and, not entering into a general scheme, they were apparently not conceived with the precision necessary to master them.

Other recently completed projects include Otto Jespersen’s Language, in which he uses his impressive range of reading to outline the state of linguistics at the time (early 20th century), with a focus on the development of language as a whole — historically — and in the individual. On the way, he hints at some interesting views on language learning:

There is a Slavonic proverb, “If you wish to talk well, you must murder the language first.”

(Or as I’ve also heard it: “To be a wit, you must first be a halfwit”.)

one should not merely sprinkle the pupil, but plunge him right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as soon as possible, relying on the fact that a great deal will arrange itself in the brain without the inculcation of too many special rules and explanations.

His How to Teach a Foreign Language should be leaving DP soon, so there’ll be more where that came from.

Light relief was provided by Dion Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn: not of the highest literary merit, but some interesting background to Joyce.

52 books finished in the last six months (though the number is inflated slightly by the small, if well-formed, Wildeana).

Literature

Girl Meets Boy — Ali Smith
Between the Assassinations — Aravind Adiga
Last Man in Tower — Aravind Adiga
The Portable Veblen — Elizabeth McKenzie
Death and the Penguin — Andrey Kurkov
An Artist of the Floating World — Kazuo Ishiguro
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher — Hilary Mantel
The Steep Approach to Garbadale — Iain Banks
The Taxidermist’s Daughter — Kate Mosse
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
Oryx and Crake — Margaret Atwood
Rivers of Babylon — Peter Pišťanek
Fire Down Below — William Golding
Angels Over Elsinore — Clive James
Birchwood — John Banville
Mother Night — Kurt Vonnegut
Orlando — Virginia Woolf
Room — Emma Donoghue
On Chesil Beach — Ian McEwan

Standouts here were The Portable Veblen (a quirkier Jonathan Franzen), Angels Over Elsinore, which gave me a whole new perspective on Clive James, and (at the risk of a back-handed compliment) the first half of Room.

Wilde

A Woman of No Importance — Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde — Richard Ellmann
An Ideal Husband — Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde
De Profundis — Oscar Wilde
Lady Windermere’s Fan — Oscar Wilde

Obviously, having finally got round to reading my 20 year old copy of Ellmann’s biography, I had to stop every so often to read the actual plays. So he gets his own section.

Trash

Signed, Picpus — Georges Simenon
Saints of the Shadow Bible — Ian Rankin
I, Partridge — Steve Coogan

I started reading Fleshmarket Close too, but stopped after about 20 pages when I still couldn’t decide whether I’d already read it. Took that as a sign.

SF/F

The Martians — Kim Stanley Robinson
Poseidon’s Wake — Alastair Reynolds
Redemption Ark — Alastair Reynolds
Solaris — Stanislav Lem
Aurora — Kim Stanley Robinson
Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang
River of Gods — Ian McDonald
Shikasta — Doris Lessing
In Viriconium — M. John Harrison

Ted Chiang was my big discovery here — philosophical and enjoyable SF stories. Having earlier given up on The Golden Notebook, I trudged through Shikasta, but was not impressed.

Non-fiction

The Aquariums of Pyongyang — Kang Chol-Hwan
The Hare with the Amber Eyes — Edmund de Waal
What If? — Randall Munroe
Mortality — Christopher Hitchens
One Summer: America 1927 — Bill Bryson
I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That — Ben Goldacre
Lingo — Gaston Dorren
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? — Jeanette Winterson
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism — Ha-Joon Chang

Winterson is brilliant, especially about her mother (“the trouble with a book is, you never know what’s in it until it’s too late”).

Gutenberg

Homer and the Homeric Age — W. E. Gladstone
The History of the Highland Clearances — Alexander Mackenzie
Three Years in Tibet — Ekai Kawaguchi

I finally finished reading Gladstone, though there’s still a map to track down before it can be sent to Project Gutenberg. Kawaguchi’s book, bizarrely published by Annie Besant in Madras, is a fascinating early account of the country, though his occasional claims to have “reached the plane of non-ego” don’t seem to have harmed his opinion of himself.

Children’s

The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Witch Week — Diana Wynne Jones
Kaspar: Prince of Cats — Michael Morpurgo

Gave up on

Dishonourable mention for a couple of books which I couldn’t force down. Coincidentally, both were inept in the same way, indicating that a foreigner was talking by having them say the most basic words in their own language. Annoying, ja?

The Zone of Interest — Martin Amis
Snowdrops — A. D. Miller