Holiday Reading — Coming Soon

By Alan Jacobs • November 30, 2012, 6:28 AM

This is the time of year when I start looking towards the end of the semester and the all-too-brief period I’ll have to relax and do a bit of reading for fun. (And yes, I do realize that I am blessed to have that time, which people in many other professions do not have — but I want more! More, I tell you!) So here are some books I want to read or re-read this coming holiday season:

Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (re-read)
Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (re-read)
Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom
poems of C. P. Cavafy

I may change my mind and not read any of those — I believe in reading at Whim — but right now those are the ones calling my name.

By the way, I recently read Roger Scruton’s How to Think Seriously About the Planet and will present some thoughts in the coming days. At least I hope to.

12 Responses to Holiday Reading — Coming Soon

Mark Henderson says:

November 30, 2012 at 8:34 am

Recommend Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, if you haven’t read it already. I note you re-read books – I’ve always found that to be highly recommended, especially as there a so few books published these days worth the time of reading. TS Eliot, an over-rated poet but an excellent literary critic, never thought he’d truly read a book unless he’d left copious notes in the margins – mark them up!
Alison says:

November 30, 2012 at 9:02 am

Thank you for this post. I love it when you post about books! (I formerly read your blog Text Patterns and got some great book ideas from there as well, and I own The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.) I purchased Keith Thomas’s The Ends of Life because you recommended it so highly, and I truly enjoyed it. I am definitely going to check out the biography of Nabokov, as well as The Presence of the Kingdom now. I really enjoyed The Little Stranger. It took me several tries to get into it, but once I did, I really loved it. Please keep us posted about what you think of your holiday reading.

I have some time to read over my Christmas break because I have a week off then. My only lament is that I am not a faster reader and cannot get more books read.
Ted says:

November 30, 2012 at 9:14 am

Wow. What a great list. In re Kenner: I’m beginning to think that at the end of the day it did Pound no favors for such a powerful writer to be his, Pound’s, most prominent critic. I think E.P. was a great poet, in fragments, and not all the time, and so evidently did Kenner, but Kenner obscures that because (it was 1970, after all) he was making a case. There’s a veritable weasel moment at the end when he asks “what went wrong?”–which is something a lot of his readers must have been asking, or, rather, asking, when is K. going to start talking about what DID go wrong? for something obviously did. From a lot of what Kenner wrote in preceding pages, it would seem nothing went wrong at all. And Kenner, who loved Pound, would have done his memory a better service if he’d shown a more, ahem, rounded portrait. Pound would then I think emerge as a tragic figure. Am I making sense?
Henry Chappell says:

November 30, 2012 at 10:07 am

I’m looking forward to your thoughts on Scruton’s How to Think Seriously About the Planet. I found the book very helpful, although I sensed a British-American cultural divide in his short treatment of wilderness preservation. But I can forgive an Englishman for his preference for long-settled countryside over wilder country. His thoughts on climate change make sense. Best I can tell, American enviromentalists are ignoring the book. Many, I suspect, would be put off by his preference for market-based solutions. We conservatives would do well to think carefully about these issues.
Scott Lahti says:

November 30, 2012 at 11:16 am

I’ve just posted the annual “Books of the Year” roundup from The Times Literary Supplement for November 30, 2012.
Binx says:

November 30, 2012 at 3:42 pm

I am not a fast reader either, but I am slogging through Moby Dick for the second time presently. Not unrelated, I am also perusing for the second time the author of this blog’s book on Original Sin.
Matt says:

November 30, 2012 at 8:05 pm

I haven’t read any of those books. It’s amazing how blessed people of this age are in terms of the intellectual output they’re able to read. I love Amazon.com’s wishlist feature. As soon as I hear about a book that sounds intriguing to me, I rush over to it and put it on my to read list. Alas, I put books on it, far quicker than I can cross books off.

Being as we’re in the middle of the so-called giving season, I’d recommend Through the Eye of the Needle by Peter Brown. It’s a thourough, panaromic look at how wealth was viewed from the end of Pagan Rome, to Christian ruled Rome, to it’s fall. For anyone interested in ancient Rome or early Christianity it’s a treasure. It also should be said, I’m extremely impressed with the author’s erudition. It’s the first book I’ve read in years where every other page has a word of which I don’t know the definition. But a little learning doesn’t hurt anyone.
PDGM says:

November 30, 2012 at 8:52 pm

Ted, Interesting and I think accurate ideas on Pound. Intermittent genius; as if the muse spoke to him at certain times, then abandoned him to his own obsessions at others. When he’s good, he’s amazing; but there are parts I just cannot for the life of me read in any concerted way.

Alan: I note the Burgess, and wonder if you ever read Earthly Powers. I reread this every 3 to 5 years. It manages to work in at least two of my interests: Catholic Christianity and the history of British literature in the 20th century. That it also has a colonial element–I grew up in British colonies– is another plus. Burgess also wrote a novel of early Christianity which I rather like and may reread between semesters; but I cannot remember its name.
Scott Lahti says:

December 2, 2012 at 2:13 pm

I’ve posted links to, and cherries plucked from, more “Books of the Year” lists for 2012 from the English and American media (scroll past the NatGeo picture feature):

Crackling snaps, Ballot of reading goal, Better bred than TED, &c.
Ted says:

December 4, 2012 at 3:01 pm

PDGM: I thought I read everything by Burgess, but early Christianity–I don’t remember. There is the Moses thing, from the TV show he wrote for Burt Lancaster. That can’t be it.

Glad to hear you agree with me about Pound. In my view Kenner is much more satisfying on Joyce, or Yeats, or Beckett, or Lewis, where he doesn’t have an emotional dog in the hunt. His later antipathy to much of Eliot is not pleasant, at least to me.
Scott Lahti says:

December 5, 2012 at 12:30 pm

“Burgess also wrote a novel of early Christianity which I rather like and may reread between semesters; but I cannot remember its name.”

The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985), in which “Both reader and author have marvellous fun. Some ten or dozen emperors or empresses are stabbed, hacked to pieces, poisoned or otherwise brutally murderred. Few varieties of curious sex are not given a showing. And as for the burning of Rome, throwing Christians to the lions, and the sacking of the temple at Jerusalem – what an opportunity they provide for Burgess’s rumbustious style.” – The Sunday Telegraph
Scott Lahti says:

December 5, 2012 at 3:51 pm

At the risk of turning this learned parliament (or is it more of a funkadelic?) into one big House of Burgess’s, I shyly note that fans of the author at issue might enjoy the 3840-word Anthony Burgess Omnibus I’ve just, with the accustomed aid of my bursting Gmail archive, posted to my Google Drive, from which this smile-raiser:

Jezu, Joie of Mots’ Downsizing: from a customer review at Amazon.com from 2005, of One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings by Anthony Burgess, a roast by Burgess of thinly-sliced Gallic:

“The French seem determined to destroy their Roman inheritance by chopping up words until they become as short as possible, and as capable of being confused with other chopped-up words as only a genuinely morbid condition of language can allow. Even when a French word or name bears some visual resemblance to its classical original, the spoken form submits to the axe. I can never grow used to pronouncing ‘Jesus Christ’ as ‘Jezu Cri’, and I feel that if the French could cut the holy name down to something like ‘Je Cr’, they would.”