Reading post: Books from the desk room

November is over, so it's time for another reading update. In November, I decided to read books from the little shelf above the closet in our office, or as we call it, the desk room (it has 5 desks in it). However, I wasn't really in the mood to read a lot of serious books on language, so it was a rough month. 

I started with Morphology of the Folktale by V. Propp, which was a text used in a rhetoric class I took more than 40 years ago. Why didn't I read it then, I wondered. Well, in fact, I did read it then -- there it is, in my list book, fall of 1981. OK, put that back on the shelf. Another book I pulled out but didn't read was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth -- it looked interesting, but I just didn't get to it. In all, I read only three books from the desk room this month. Here's the full story:

1.  An Invitation to Old English & Anglo-Saxon England by Bruce Mitchell. I thought this book always looked so interesting, sitting there unread on my shelf. I took a semester of Old English in grad school, though I remember almost nothing from it. My Old English professor used to talk about Anglo-Saxon culture, so I looked forward to reading the "Anglo-Saxon England" part of the book. Well, it turns out that in fact you have to learn Old English to read this. Mitchell is very gentle about it, he helps you along the way -- it is an "invitation" after all -- but after a couple of chapters of grammar, when he turns to the history of Anglo-Saxon England in Part III, he just gives you sections of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- in the original Old English. With difficult words glossed below, and notes, but it's not the same as a translation. So in order to read the history, I had to drag myself through the Old English.
   
   It was like picking up a book about the Pyramids, only to discover that you have to learn Arabic to read it. I am too old to learn a language! I tried, sort of, but it was impossible. Everything I read about the grammar I immediately forgot. And later it got worse: Part IV, "A Garden of Old English Literature," was almost entirely in Old English. I'm going to say I read this book -- I read all the parts written in Modern English and struggled with the Old English -- but I'm not sure Mitchell would agree. What a nightmare. I spent two weeks on it. Keeping it, but perhaps someday I'll give it to someone who actually wants to learn some Old English. (Will that ever happen? Are there such people?)
   
   
2. Early English Poems selected & edited by Henry S. Pancoast & John Duncan Spaeth. I don't know why I have this book, published in 1911, which has Louise Pound's name on the flyleaf. It must have belonged to my father, who studied English under Louise Pound at the University of Nebraska in the 1940s. Anyway, I picked it up right after finishing the book on Old English and I thought -- I should have read this at the same time! Because here are translations of many of the Old English texts Bruce Mitchell was trying to make me read. (Though they were rather old-fashioned translations -- I much prefer Seamus Heaney's Beowulf to the one in this book.) After the Old English section, however, nothing was translated, so I had to read Chaucer in the original Middle English. But after struggling through all the Old English in the previous book, Middle English was easy. In general, though, this book was not easy, and it took me the second half of the month to get through it. I'm keeping it, though -- a good reference text.
   
   One thing that amused me: my favorite author, Barbara Pym, studied English at Oxford and her books are full of obscure quotations from what she calls "our greater English poets." What I learned from this book is that many of her characters were probably named after those poets. For instance, her Archbishop Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle must have been named for the poet Thomas Hoccleve (1370-1450), and Miss Lydgate, who appears in Excellent Women and Less Than Angels, was probably named for the poet John Lydgate (1370-1451). Also, some of the characters in Some Tame Gazelle have studied Old and Middle English, and they refer to the poems "Piers Plowman" and "The Owl and the Nightingale," neither of which I had read before. Well, now I have (excerpts, anyway).
   
   
3. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner. While poking around in the piles of papers under my desk, I glanced at the row of books on the shelf down there (I don't know why my desk has a bookshelf underneath it, but it does) and spotted this one. I've never read that, have I? I decided it would be a good fit for the last few days of the month, and in fact I finished it about ten minutes before December began. What a great book about writing! I loved it. It was published in 1983, so I've had 40 years to find it and read it. Better late than never. I love Gardner's approach to the whole "should I be a novelist" thing. He refuses to base it on money, reminding his readers that no serious novelists live off their earnings. Get a job that gives you lots of free time, live off your spouse, resign yourself to skipping the finer things in life, or inherit money. Writing isn't going to pay. The reason to write is because it brings great joy:
   
   "It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive -- literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell -- it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, willing to give up almost anything for his art, and makes him, if he fails, such a miserable human being."
   
   I also like his list of writers' typical characteristics: wit, obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness, childishness, a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both, remarkable powers of eidetic recall, a strange mixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, patience like a cat's, a criminal streak of cunning, psychological instability, recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence (and an incurable addiction to stories). It reminded me of Barbara Pym's comment about how no one likes writers:
   
   "But once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends." (from Jane and Prudence, Chapter 12)
   
   Finally, I realized (after studying the list of his previous publications) that Gardner was a specialist in Old and Middle English. He translated "The Owl and the Nightingale," he wrote a biography of Chaucer, and his most famous novel, Grendel, is about the monster in Beowulf. I went right out and got a copy of Grendel at the Bookworm yesterday.
   
   Gardner died in 1982, at the age of 49 (this book was published posthumously).
   

One more month in 2023. In December we move on to the kids' bedroom. They have scads of children's books, from picture books to YA, but I've read most of them already. Instead of those, I'm going to focus on another shelf above a closet -- their closet, that is. On this shelf, we keep our small science fiction & fantasy collection. No reason -- we just needed a place for those books and here was a place. I don't love scifi, so I haven't read a lot of these books. I decided to just pick five to read this month and we'll see how it goes. 

Of course in December I mainly like to read Christmas books, so I may set these aside and read about roasting chestnuts and holly and mistletoe instead, but whatever happens is fine.