Symbolic Forest

It’s always nice, when you go away and rent a cottage for a few days, to see if it’s been furnished with any interesting books. Sometimes you’re unlucky, and there’s nothing at all, or something worse than useless that charity shops would turn away. Sometimes, though, there’s something good: a book that makes you think “oh, I’d have read that if I knew it existed,” or something relevant to the local area. When visiting Calderdale a couple of years ago I found a fascinating book about the in-depth history of the parish we were staying in, right down to the surviving evidence for its medieval boundaries. Well, I thought it was fascinating, at any rate. Naturally, as you can’t take the books home with you, there’s a pressure to at least finish enough of a potentially-interesting one to see if you might want a copy yourself, or read the whole thing before you go.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, Jim Perrin, Cymru, Wales.

When I first moved down to South-West England, I was intrigued to note that one of the major local commercial property firms, their boards decorating every half-empty high street, was called Alder King. No doubt this is because at some point in the distant past Mr Alder and Mr King got together to form a business (their website is sadly unhelpful on the subject), but in my own private imagination I liked to think that their founder was deliberately trying to invoke a mythical archetype, implying that the cycle of closure, vacancy and opening on the High Street echoed the ancient cycle of death, sacrifice and rebirth, the brief but spiritually charged reign of the sacred king destroyed by the Great Goddess as described by James Frazer and popularised by one of the twentieth century’s best-known English-language poets. No doubt that poet, if he had lived to the 2010s and had seen Alder King’s advertising boards himself, would have thought the same. Rather, he would not just have thought “that’s an amusing coincidence of naming,” as I did: he would have thought it yet more evidence that all of his theories about mythology and prehistory were incontrovertibly, emotionally and poetically true, and that anyone who disagreed with him was probably a contemptible writer-of-prose or Apollonian poetaster with a degree from Cambridge. At least, I assume that’s what he would have thought. I’ve never managed to finish reading his book on the subject, and I’ve threatened to write a blog post about it more than once in the distant past. Today’s Book I Haven’t Read is, as you potentially have already guessed from this introduction, The White Goddess by Robert Graves.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, reading, religion, paganism, Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Goodbye To All That, poetry, history, mythology, fake history, fake mythology, Ancient Britain, anthropology, archaeology, Blodeuwedd, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gwydion, Mabinogi, Mabinogion, Cad Goddeu, Cymru, Wales.

Time to answer some of the questions that have been sent in over the month or so since I revived this site.

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Keyword noise: Readers Letters, Battle of Hastings, history, counterfactual, alternate timeline, Cymru, Wales, Books I Haven't Read, Francis Bennion, E Shrdlu, blogging, Sarah from Ipswich.

With such a big pile of books each for Christmas, there was bound to be something that I wouldn’t be able to make it through. The ironic thing, though, is that this Book I Haven’t Read is probably, in one sense, the easiest read on the pile. Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Discworld, fantasy, literature, reading, Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals.

Yesterday’s post, about how we can’t stop ourselves buying books, segues quite nicely into today’s. We didn’t just buy books on Saturday; we bought more on Sunday, from the weekend bookstall outside the Watershed that I remember mentioning not that long ago. I picked up a copy of By Hook Or By Crook by David Crystal; and then, thought to myself, should I really be buying a David Crystal book when I already have a book of his on the shelves that I haven’t yet read? I didn’t pause for long, because “you’ve already got one by him” is hardly a very good reason for not buying a book, but it’s true that the one Crystal book already on our shelves is one that I’ve never been able to get very far with. It is: The Stories Of English.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, By Hook Or By Crook, David Crystal, English, language, linguistics, literature, philology, reading, The Stories Of English.

One thing about yesterday’s post: it gives you a good look at the state of one of our bookshelves. Not a good enough look to make out what most of the books are, though, unless they’re books with distinctive spines that you’re already familiar with – like Peter Ackroyds’s London, for example.

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Keyword noise: biography, books, Books I Haven't Read, Fatal Purity, France, French Revolution, history, literature, Maximilien Robespierre, review, Robert Graves, Robespierre, Ruth Scurr, The White Goddess.

Getting this website going again, and posting things regularly, I was thinking that maybe I should resurrect Books I Haven’t Read, an ongoing series of posts in which I reviewed books that I hadn’t managed to finish reading, and briefly discussed why. This was on the grounds that reviews of bad books are often more interesting than reviews of good books;^* many book reviewers probably get away without reading the whole thing; and if I’m going to talk about something, I may as well be honest about whether I’ve read it or not. Hence, Books I Haven’t Read, which annoyed at least one author who discovered it and couldn’t resist responding.^**

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Keyword noise: archaeology, Books I Haven't Read, Christopher Hill, Robert Graves, civil war, English Civil War, Greek Myths, history, Levellers, literature, mythology, poetics, The White Goddess, The World Turned Upside Down.

Books I Haven’t Read has come round once again. I considered leaving it for a while, after the last Book I Haven’t Read – the Author I Hadn’t Read managed to find it, and left a comment calling me “pathetic”. Ah, well, if you’re going to ego-surf, you have to be prepared for what you might find.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Flann O'Brien, House Of Leaves, literature, Mark Z Danielewski, reading.

First Christmas present bought already, but I’m still going to have to devote the weekend to running around the county hoping desperately to find something inspirational. I’m not saying what I’ve already bought. It’s for my dad, and I don’t think he reads this place, but you never know.

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Keyword noise: Anne Atkins, BBC, bedsit, Big Dave, books, Books I Haven't Read, Christianity, Yuletide, Christmas presents, house hunting, House Of Leaves, literature, London, Mark Z Danielewski, presents, radio, reading, religion, shopping, studio flat, Thought For The Day.

I haven’t read Ian McEwan‘s novel Atonement. It is fetching a lot of publicity at the moment, because McEwan has been accused of copying phrases from the biography of wartime nurse and romantic novelist Lucilla Andrews. He, of course, says the claims are ridiculous, and that all he did was normal research. Other people have said the same thing, noting that he has acknowledged his large debt to Andrews.

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Keyword noise: Atonement, books, Books I Haven't Read, David St John Thomas, Ernest Simmons, fiction, Francis Bennion, historical fiction, history, Ian McEwan, Jack Simmons, literature, Lucilla Andrews, Memoirs Of A Station Master, reading, research, source material, The Country Railway, Victorian Railway Days.

As I said last time this series popped up, it was originally supposed to be a bit more regular than this. This entry, too, feels slightly like I’m repeating what I’ve said before. Not only is it a science fiction book like the last one, it’s by an author who has cropped up previously. Today’s Book I Haven’t Read is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, books, Books I Haven't Read, Mesopotamia, Neal Stephenson, reading, science fiction, Snow Crash, Sumerian.

Books I Haven’t Read was supposed to be a regular sequence of articles, but has been on pause since – ooh, last November, by the look of things. It fell by the wayside because of a post I never wrote, about a book I couldn’t finish because I came across a passage in it which seemed to have been blatantly lifted from an obscure Victorian memoir. I’ll manage to write about it, one day. In the meantime, here’s another book I haven’t read. *Iron Sunrise* by Charlie Charles Stross.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Charles Stross, Charlie Stross, Iron Sunrise, July 7th, literature, reading, sci fi, science fiction, terrorism.

This week’s Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading is something I don’t actually have a copy of myself. I bought it for my dad, a few years back, as a birthday present. He didn’t manage to finish it. I tried myself, and didn’t manage either. This week’s book is *Revolution In The Head: The Beatles’ Records And The Sixties* by Ian MacDonald.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Ian MacDonald, literature, music, reading, Revolution In The Head, The Beatles.

Update, August 20^th 2020: A number of posts on this site have a minor update at the bottom, but not many have an update at the top.

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Keyword noise: books, Books I Haven't Read, Cryptonomicon, literature, Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, reading, Samuel Pepys, SF, The Baroque Cycle, The Confusion, The System Of The World.

On Friday, I took the morning off work to take the car for its service. I’d told the garage I’d stop and wait there, in the hope that it would get done a bit quicker. Expecting to be stuck in one place for a couple of hours, I took a book with me in the hope that I’d continue reading it once I was at home. This week’s Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading: *Samuel Pepys: An Unequalled Self* by Claire Tomalin.

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Keyword noise: An Unequalled Self, Books I Haven't Read, Claire Tomalin, diaries, literature, Pepys Diary, reading, Samuel Pepys.

Following on from Thursday’s post, here’s the first Book I Haven’t Managed To Finish Reading Yet.

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Keyword noise: Books I Haven't Read, A History Of God, books, eschatology, god, Karen Armstrong, history, monotheism, reading, religion.

I love reading. Read things all the time. I’m not in the middle of any books at the moment though, which is unusual. On the other hand, there are lots of books that I started reading and haven’t finished; it’s just that I put them down too long ago to count as “still reading”. If I picked them up again, I’d have to start from scratch.

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Keyword noise: books, reading, Books I Haven't Read.