Interconnectedness

I think it was The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul  by Douglas Adams that introduced me to the concept of ‘the ultimate interconnectedness of all things’, something I was reminded of while reading
Time Out’s 1000 Books to change your life

(Because I just can’t help myself – I have to keep searching out more and more books to not get round to reading.)

In an essay on how science can help us to understand what it is to be human, Kenan Malik points out that:  ‘Historically, the question of what it is to be human – who are we? Where did we come from? What defines our nature? – has been the domain of poets and philosophers, theologians and novelists.’

He goes on to mention a couple more books that have to be placed on my I-would-really-like-to-read-that-if-I-have-the-time-which-of-course-I-never-will…unless-I-ever-do-get-stranded-on-a-desert-island-and-a-copy-happens-to-wash-up-on-the-shore-beside-me list: One I hadn’t heard of before…
The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and the Animals

by Charles Darwin
and one I very nearly read when it came out…
The Blank Slate

The Denial of Human Nature in Modern Intellectual Life
by Steven Pinker

I really should have read that one.
Should have? Should? Must. Must?
In my defence, I can’t be accused of denying human nature. On the contrary, I’m facing up to my torpid nature here by admitting my literary neglect.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I visited a library today. Always a bad move to venture into a place full of enticingly unread books, and inevitably they had something I couldn’t resist – a brand new copy of the 20th anniversary edition of another book that I doubt I will ever finish reading, still less understand:

Gödel, Escher, Bach:
an Eternal Golden Braid
 
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll
by
Douglas R. Hofstadter

The question Hofstadter seeks to tackle with this mindboggling book is: “What is a self, and how can a self come out of inanimate matter?” That’s a big one. No, that’s the big one. His extraordinary efforts – weaving together art, music, mathematics, philosophy and consciousness – earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.

If I ever get marooned on a desert island I hope I have a copy with me. It will certainly provide a lot for me to get my head around -
in the unlikely event that I do actually read it…

What are we and why are we here? Where is here anyway? Are we really here at all? Where did we come from, and where are we going?

ACC RIP

Very sad to hear of the death of one of my heroes today.
I grew up reading the novels and short stories of Arthur C. Clarke,
who has died at the age of 90. (Official biography here.)
The man was such a visionary, he even managed to die in the future.

The imagination behind books like Rendezvous With Rama and The Fountains of Paradise was astounding, and how many films and television shows have borrowed that iconic image of spaceships hovering over the cities of the world in Childhood’s End?

Not forgetting all those vividly memorable short stories like The Star, The Nine Billion Names of God and, of course, The Sentinel, which inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There are still lots of his books I haven’t read: mainly the ones I didn’t get my sticky hands on when I was a kid. The biggest of which I have got down off the shelf tonight:

Greetings Carbon-Based Bipeds

A collection of his essays, subtitled, not immodestly,
‘A vision of the 20th century as it happened.’

So it’s goodbye to one of the most forward thinking carbon-based bipeds Planet Earth has ever known. We will miss your input sir.

Can’t read ‘em Hall

Today brought more proof that it is never going to be possible for me to read every book I would like to read.

I managed to refrain from borrowing any more books from the library, despite there being several trying to jump off the shelves into my hand…

I had been thinking about borrowing
Changing Places

by David Lodge,
thanks (if thanks is the right word for someone who pushes another book under my nose) to Prole Art Threat who also blogged about Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which I still haven’t finished reading yet after being diverted by Creation). He or she was reminded of “the great parlour game ‘Humiliation’ in Changing Places [...] in which players compete to admit to the most shocking unread classic” – that sounds great fun, but the blurb put me off slightly: it sounds a bit dated; and then I remembered that I still haven’t read that other classic campus novel
The History Man

by Malcolm Bradbury
(currently sitting on a shelf to my left).
Besides, Lodge has a new novel out in a few weeks:
Deaf Sentence

and anyway I’ve never found him all that funny.
Witty, yes, but not funny.

I also refrained from borrowing
Gut Feelings

by Gerd Gigerenzer
but I have a gut feeling that I will have a read of that sometime soon…ish.

Then this evening, disaster struck. I was watching Mastermind, and one of the specialist subjects was the novels of Jasper Fforde – an author I’d only vaguely heard of before and who, I learned, is in the habit of writing books within which characters enter other books and change things. What kind of evil temptation is that to a bookaholic? It’s like finding out that someone has started selling chocolate flavoured drugs to kiddies.

Also tonight I read that two more books on my to-be-read-(possibly)-list have been shortlisted for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction:

The Carhullan Army

 by Sarah Hall

and

The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall

Plus, just a cursory glance at the shortlist led to
The H-Bomb Girl

by Stephen Baxter
catching my interest as well.

Can’t read ‘em all though.

Creation

Something else I learned about The Name of the Rose this week, without actually reading any of it, was that one of the characters is an Egyptian alchemist who attributes the creation of the world to a spasm of ‘divine laughter’. I learned this from

Creation (Artists, Gods and Origins)

by Peter Conrad

a magnificent tour de force comparing the depictions of creation in art, books, philosophy, religion and mythology – subjects of which Conrad shows an awesome breadth of knowledge.

It’s the sort of book you could give Stephen Fry for Christmas.

Don’t just take my word for it.
This is what Terry Eagleton said in the London Review of Books:

“If God spans the whole of Creation, Peter Conrad runs him a close second. This is an astonishingly erudite work, one which would still be impressive for its panoptic learning even if ‘Peter Conrad’ turned out to be the name of a committee of twenty or so scholars. Creation ranges from alchemy, the Kabbalah, Finnish mythology and primitive cave paintings to Stravinsky, Duke Ellington and Steven Spielberg, glancing en route at virtually every major European writer or artist. It is crammed with curios and choice anecdotes, all the way from Richard III’s hump to an oiled arm in a Mapplethorpe photograph probing a gaping anus. In a work which ranges effortlessly across the major arts, we are treated to learned disquisitions on Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo, Milton, Rameau, Sade, Mozart, Balzac, Darwin, Wagner, Rodin, Philip Pullman and a supporting cast of hundreds. A single page, selected at random and by no means the most thickly populated, scatters references to Conrad (Joseph), Hesiod, Rilke, Shakespeare, Plato, Mann, George Eliot, Gide and St John.”

Having been so impressed by Creation (not that I’m anywhere near finishing it, of course) I now have another big book on my must-read list – Conrad’s earlier work, exploring the 20th century:

Modern Times, Modern Places:
Life and Art in the Twentieth Century

It sounds equally overwhelming in its scope.

 

The Name of the Rose

In chapter three of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Bayard discusses the plot of another of the hundreds of books on my shelves that I haven’t read yet:
 
The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

Apparently the dénouement involves two characters discussing the dangerousness of a book, unhindered by the fact that neither of them have actually read it. (Although I’m sure it’s a lot more thrilling than I’ve just made it sound.)

I had been wary of Eco, not having understood much of Foucault’s Pendulum, but learning that the abbey in The Name of the Rose contains a labyrinthine library, and that a book lies at the heart of the mystery, makes it sound irresistable. So maybe I should read this one soon. I must think it over. Perhaps I’ll have to read other books first though…

How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Many people are out there writing blogs about the books they read, and I salute them for their efforts, but it occurred to me a couple of years ago that blogging about all the books I haven’t read yet would be so much easier: there are so many more of them, and they keep on coming…

Yesterday I got hold of Pierre Bayard’s
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

Obviously I haven’t read it yet, I’ve barely even skimmed the preface, but it’s good to see someone else trying to break the taboo about not-reading books.

In his enlightening book The Black Swan (which, of course, I haven’t finished reading yet either) Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of how most visitors to Umberto Eco, on seeing his vast library of thirty thousand books, ask him how many of them he has read. They are missing the point, as Taleb puts it: books are a research tool. “Read books,” he says, “are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means [...] allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly.”

Indeed they do. I’m surrounded by hundreds of them. It can’t be helped though. It doesn’t matter how many books you do read, the number you discover that you haven’t read will always increase at a much faster rate, it’s inevitable. As Bayard says on page six (yes, I have at least got that far) of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read:

 ”This encounter with the infinity of available books offers a certain encouragement not to read at all. Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain?”

A better conclusion, as Bayard explains, is that we must learn to appreciate books even if we haven’t actually read them.