A new chapter

 

A recent and enjoyable read

I've wanted to start this book blog for ages, and the period of summer heat is as good a time as any.  Other parts of my blog life focus on wine and music, and on our life since moving to France.  But there is a huge gap - I spend a lot of time reading, and this blog will focus on that, as well as on library work which has taken an increasing amount of time since 2021.  

I trained as a librarian and worked in libraries for a while in my 20s.  Since then my paid work was always closely tied to information sharing, combining the parallel pleasures of making information more accessible and trying to understand and respond to people's need to know.  These days the growth of fake news, disinformation, flat denial and plain ignorance makes the question 'what is truth?' (biblical of course, but ageless) ever mor complex and important.  

My day always starts and ends with reading.  First thing in the morning it is the daily newspapers, the local Midi Libre for French news and the British Guardian, supplemented throughout the days and weeks by The Week (a British weekly news digest), the London Review of Books every fortnight and a skim of Private Eye.   Last thing at night, a variety of fiction and non-fiction books of which much more anon.

A lot of my reading is history and non-fiction generally - one of my current books is Paddy Ashdown's The cruel victory, whose interest to me dates back to our twinning with Die in the Drôme, just below the Vercors plateau.   The story is fascinating, complex and often tragic.  This has also been connected with our French conversation group, now often twice a week on Tuesday and Friday mornings.  In the more advanced group we usually read a text in French and improve our pronunciation as well as our comprehension!   

Reading, along with music on the radio and various tv regulars, binge watching DVD series and watching and listening to sport, fill much of my time.  Even some of my regular exercise, on a static bike, is accompanied by reading.  Mary's life is not very different, and we both also cook and share other daily chores; though she spends more time than I do practising music (her cello is often to be heard as I write, though less in the hot weather!) and we both get around to local activities and for dog walking, shopping etc.  

But a recent addition to both home-based activity and outings has been working with the anglophone library in Montpellier, for which I now maintain the catalogue of over 2,000 titles and convene a book selection group.  This is run by a small voluntary association on a pattern very familiar throughout French daily life.  Often such associations get local authority support (in our case mainly the use of a very pleasant dedicated space to house the collection and to provide meeting, processing and reading facilities).  We've bought well over 50 new titles in the past year, and had many more welcome donations.

To finish this post, a few quotations about books:  

• "A nineteenth-century Kentucky belief held that cracking the baby’s first louse on the Bible would enhance its reading abilities (the baby’s, not the louse’s) (from Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers by Emma Smith

• "The ultimate use of books as talismans is their inclusion in coffins with their owners (perhaps in expectation of this, it is now possible to buy a coffin that serves as a bookcase until it is needed). This may draw on ancient Egyptian traditions of packing the dead off to the underworld with the guiding papyrus scroll of The Book of the Dead." (also from Portable Magic)

Emma Smith has also taught me a new word I may rarely use - ekphrastic, which is the literary device of describing visual material in detail.  I may not need this word very often!

In the anglophone library