Book fest

 

It has been an impossibly long time, but there have been important things. Which is an excuse. There are always things, it’s called life. I knew that something was not right, but the “wrongness” had accumulated over a long time, so I didn’t know anymore what “okay” had been like. I won’t go into the “medical” side of things, I just remember to have noticed at one point that I didn’t really READ anymore; I just wrote things about reading from my memories of what it had been like. Now that is mended, I am reading again! So, the compulsory break was good for something, and this is a fresh start. It will all be about READING now.

 

First time I noticed the difference was when I re-read Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends”. As it is often the case, this was caused by a screen adaptation, available on ZDF media centre. It isn’t great like the one for “Normal People”, but it gradually became interesting to the point that I decided to re-read the book. I hadn’t really liked the book either, not like I had loved “Normal People” (which I read first), in fact I had been slightly annoyed by these people who had all the things I never had and still thought they had problems. Now I was mesmerized. How could I have “missed” such an exceptional book! I won’t go into detail, I don’t remember it well enough, having moved on, but I retain the memory of REALLY reading again like a forgotten flavour …

 

It won’t do, though, for the blog, to keep mentioning great books. One question already popped up which became more acute later: Why is READING BOOKS so entirely different from any other kind of reading?

 

My ”British history project” is going well too, though I am marooned in first century AD for probably a very long time. I haven’t even finished the four volumes about Boudica and her Celts by Manda Scott yet, although I am approaching the final battle. To be honest, in the long run they were a tedious and annoying read, nonetheless they taught me a few very important things about history and how I “use” it, and I will slowly re-read them as “background” when I am getting round to the time-consuming pleasure of sampling the “real” history behind them. From the little I have read yet, I came to the – maybe – premature conclusion that nothing in these books literally tells me something about who the Celts were. (Quite unlike Bernard Cornwell’s “Stonehenge”, by the way, which, astonishingly, gave me some real understanding of what “Bronze age” people might have been about.) Nonetheless, I think that Scott's overall conclusion is sound, namely that Roman culture – which really is so astonishingly like our own in many respects – has created a future that is in many ways problematic. In particular, patriarchal structures – which still rule most of the world including parts of my own! – were not inevitable. The Roman’s were just so successful because of the military system they created that they first flattened everything and convinced the rest with their superior technology and administration. In this way, they made patriarchism – on which their culture is based – permanent for millennia to come. And this is where it becomes so interesting because I understood that the multiple “problems”, the ugliness and inacceptable blood-letting of the present, is partially happening because we are on our way to OVERCOME patriarchism for good, and this is causing a lot of “stress” in the system. As much as all these fascists, trumpists, homophobes and leaders of Medieval cults might want to ignore it: the leading culture AROUND THE GLOBE is no longer patriarchal but based on freedom of the individual, diversity, flat hierarchies and so on. (Basically something I don’t even have a name for yet, which is exciting! We want to call it democracy because that’s what WE know, but it is not.) And this time it’s irreversible because global economy and “the internet” are on board. It won’t “go away” anytime soon.

 

Rome did go away eventually, it probably just took longer than people would have imagined. The death throes of patriarchism will also go on for a long time still, at the loss of many lives; they might even lead to our extinction, but the one thing I know for sure – and which I have understood on a deeper level looking at the Romans from a different perspective! – is that we are right in the middle of them.

 

Now I am coming to my very own “book fest” which I have staged this week, having finally received the hard copy of Richard Armitage’s first novel “Geneva”. Somehow this f... program forces me to write in HTML now and doesn’t allow me to insert pictures anymore, therefore I have to describe it. I bought a quarter bottle of champagne, propped the beautiful new book against the wall, put a big, bright-yellow candle in front of it and placed the champagne and one of the trendy new flutes I recently bought from Depot on the side. Then I lighted the candle, drank the champagne and began to read the book. It was great!

 

The detour was actually good because it provided an occasion for me to try and be atmospheric, and this is what struck me when I first read the book myself. I loved hearing it on Audible, especially as a was so chuffed that Nicola Walker gave her voice to Sarah Collier, and I noticed the atmospheric quality then, but I enjoyed it infinitely more when I read it myself. Especially from the point when they are coming to Geneva. I could smell the cold, crisp air of the mountains and saw the lights tinkling on the lake under a supernaturally clear sky. I walked the corridors of the futuristic Schiller Institute and skidded down the icy slope in free-fall … Reading the story for the third time, it didn’t matter any longer that it is a thriller with all the faults inherent in the format. (In particular, they have to “end well” because people wouldn’t use them for recreational reading if the mirrored the “real” horror and despair of life’s disasters, and this usually makes them “deflate” towards the end.) Now I just enjoyed the incredible attention to detail that never leads to redundancy because there is a dash and a rhythm to the writing that propels the reading forward. (I was just in a position to compare it with the tedious and endlessly redundant detail of Manda Scotts books!) It is just such a BEAUTIFUL READ!

 

I became aware that I have not just collected samples of great reading but come up with two answers to my initial question along the way. The question why reading BOOKS myself is so different from having them read to me or using other media for reading. They are not mutually exclusive.

 

The first is that I have to make the effort myself – figure out HOW to read it – instead of leaving certain decisions to the actor(s) reading it. It might also make me pay more attention to features that are not inherent in the text, for example the voices of characters created by the actor(s).

 

The other explanation is that books are not “meant” to “run” in the background while I am actually doing other things, but to be approached with all my being and with all my senses – having to re-create sensual images of all kinds FROM MY OWN MEMORIES. This applies likewise to audio books but might work better when I have to do the whole business of re-creating myself. Watching stories on screen instead provides me with NEW visual input and experiences that I may add to the “library” I later use to read books …

 

So, this was the best in a long time but it is getting better. I have begun to write fiction again. But as the weather is so great outside and I have a lot of work in the garden, this will become the subject of a new post. I guess I’ll skip Halloween this year and will celebrate Thanksgiving instead – grateful for all the beautiful and useful books I have read, and for the multitudinous stories yet to be written.