Don’t know what to read?

By Ian Sansom

Ian Sansom recommends books on a theme.

This month: 10 Books To Get You Through The Rest Of Your Life
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1855)
I quote therefore I am: in quoting we reach out for a moment towards the Other, the inestimable, and the true. Also, quoting makes you sound really clever (cf. Stephen Fry).

The Bible
Of course, everyone in Northern Ireland has already read the Bible, so this recommendation is entirely superfluous. But might I recommend rereading? In the original Hebrew?

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870)
In the late nineteenth-century the publisher John Cassell recognised the need for a reference book designed for the growing number of readers who did not have the benefits of a classical education – the so-called ‘common reader’. Dear and Gentle Reader, are you a common reader? I most certainly am, and every day I thank G_d for Dr. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1810-1897) and his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

Chambers Book of Days (1864)
After thanking G-d for Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, I get up, get dressed, make a cup of tea and read Chambers – how else would I know that today, 11th February, the day of writing, is Kenkoku kinen-no-hi (Japanese National Foundation Day, which celebrates the founding of the Japanese Empire in 660 BC)?

The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1998)
If you read no other cookery book, this should be it: clear, comprehensive, utterly indispensable. From African sweet potato and spinach stew to zabaglione. All it lacks is wipe-clean pages.

H.W. Fowler’s , The Pocket Oxford Dictionary (1924)
The Pocket Oxford English Dictionary was compiled by the fitness fanatic Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) whilst staying with his tomato-growing brother Frank in Guernsey in the 1920s. I am not making this up.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900)
Outdated, poorly-edited, fusty anthology of poems that rhyme, and scan, and are written in traditional forms. A must-read.

Roget’s Thesaurus (1852)
One of the world’s most famous and widely-used works of reference, and none the worse for that. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) studied medicine at Edinburgh University, went on to become Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution, Secretary of the Royal Society, and was an original member of the Senate of London. (And note, bored and feckless retirees: Roget wrote the Thesaurus in his retirement).

William Shakespeare , Complete Works
‘The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good’ (Robert Graves).

Tolstoy , War and Peace (1865-69)
Quick, quick! If you start reading it now, you may finish it before you die.

Poems By Chris Agee

Poem By Chris Agee

Summer Plums

In the valley before Srebrenica the corn was the tallest
I’ve ever seen. Someone was reaping by sickle
what looked like lavender. Another was scything silage.
Several places, women in kerchiefs and pantaloons
were sat on grass before their houses, looking out.
Low steep hills ringed the valley

with thick woods. There were domed Bosnian
haystacks pinnacled with poles and shells of ruined houses colonized by undergrowth. It seemed right to return to renew fields and gardens amid beckoning ghosts of family and neighbours. A cow was led
on a rope by an old woman in the same dress
and a girl in shorts walked the road
to Potocari. A windfall of apples was
down in an orchard and silken plums scattered
on a forested lane. Two headstones stood
in a cornfield like a summer host
of thousands of splendid ears.

Poem by Chris Agee

Dalmatian Light

Under the bench
now weathered with the last
vestiges of varnish
like fresh grief seared to permanent bone:

three cracks on a limesstone flag,
tufts of dried grass, an ant scampering on its own
shadow, silence cupped
from soughs of sea-wind gusting-

and the same late light
stilled and honeyed
in a corner of the coffin-room
on the afternoon of your wake-night.