Books

The name of the website is DavidGreenBooks. You could be forgiven for thinking it should be DavidGreenMusic which increasingly it has recently been so before we continue with music tomorrow, here's some books.

A new, limited edition title from Sean O'Brien due shortly is Impasse, for Jules Maigret. Sean is one of the dimihishing bumber of poets I'm still interested in and so we'll have that and, having never quite got round to reading Simenon, I've ordered one from the library by way of homework. I've also nearly made it to the top of the waiting list for Sebastian Barry's Old God's Time which, if it's as good as they say it is, could lead to his back catalogue.

In the meantime, Dr. Johnson's letters, in a strange edition made up of scans of a 1925 book, provided more quality time in his most perceptive company. He so regularly says what one knew already but more elegantly than one would have put it oneself, like, in 1783 to Mrs. Thrale,

Though it be that no man can run away from himself, he way yet escape from many causes of useless uneasiness.

and, to Miss Susanna Thrale,

description is always fallacious, at least till you have seen realities you cannot know it to be true.

That is likely to be used in a music review here sooner rather than later.

This book is heavily laden with letters from Dr. Johnson's declining years and is thus sadder than a fuller survey of his active writing life but it's never less than a pleasure to engage with such a fine intelligence and enjoyable writer.

Which also applies to the time spent filling in with a revisit to Dubliners to see if it is still the best prose fiction writing in the language. These things can change. One can return to an old favourite and find it not as impressive as one thought. The Joyce of Dubliners remains sublime, though, sentence by sentence, story by story, the structure of the book as a whole and I hope the books on order aren't ready until I've once more been thrilled to bits by The Dead.  

It is the likes of James Joyce, the few paragon examples, that make one want to be a writer. They make it look easy, so one tries, and then you find out it isn't. But if they didn't do that one would presumably be impressed by something else, have a go at that and fall short at that instead.

I'm waiting with all the patience I can summon for a couple of appearances in print, not that they are anywhere near as important as they would have seemed once. And I've gone back to Strange Fowl, the ongoing work-in-progress on Shakespeare biography, and updated it slightly. Whether that ever achieves print, or if there's any point in it ever doing, remains to be seen but I like it well enough to maintain it, like an enthusiast would with a beloved vintage car.