This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with our own bookshelves. We start with a travel book.
Travel books are ubiquitous now, but most of them are anonymous in the Lonely Planet/DK sense because we don’t know who the author is. Of those that are authored, few have a distinctive style and a huge catalogue of titles like H V Morton (1892-1979). He was a pioneering travel writer from Britain, and after I discovered In Search of London (1951) before my first ever trip back to the UK in 2001, I also read A Traveller in Italy (1964) before a trip to Italy and A Stranger in Spain (1955) before a trip to Spain. You might be wondering why travel books written more than half a century ago were the catalyst for me to collect a shelf of Morton titles, and the answer is that he wrote in captivating ways about sites now labelled Places of Interest and beset by selfie-taking mass tourism. The places haven’t changed but the experience of visiting them has.
Morton was not a deep thinker, and his interests didn’t include Bookish Moments. My travel blog featuresBookish Moments from my travels. Some of these are planned, as in my pilgrimage to the birthplaces of Tolstoy and Chekhov and others are unexpected, as in the display of artwork from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. But my jottings are Homage Lite, compared to the exquisite essays to be found in Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets, (2020) by Subhash Jaireth. (Subhash, who is one of my favourite writers, has a new book out BTW, calledGeorge Orwell’s Elephant and other essays,one to look forward to.)
What I like about Subhash’s travel writing, is that he is unabashed about his love of literature and how that informs where he goes and what he does there. We can see the same thing in Antoni Jach’s recent novel Travelling Companions (2021). His narrator is like me, he likes art galleries and museums, historic sites and remarkable buildings; and he likes to loiter in cafés and restaurants and soak up the ambience while enjoying a variety of European cuisines. Where we part company is that he seeks company in the evenings. No thankyou, I’ve had enough of people by then!
How did an introvert like me become a teacher, with wall-to-wall people all day long? I can’t explain it adequately, but I can tell you that I survived with a simple strategy. When I got home (after greeting The Spouse who was usually contentedly cooking dinner) I would escape to the quiet and read a book for about half an hour to restore my sanity. Which is why I like books about the reading life and how it sustains us: Debra Adelaide’s 2019 The Innocent Reader and Carmel Bird’s (2022) Tell Tale, Reading, Writing, Remembering.
I really don’t understand people who don’t read. I mean, I really don’t understand them.
Of course I try to, by reading about them. One that comes to mind is a book by Steven Carroll, called The Gift of Speed. It’s No 2 in the Glenroy Series, and I read it when it was published, back in 2004. It’s about an adolescent who’s obsessed by cricket and for the first time, I got an inkling of the kind of emotion that being interested in cricket might arouse. Thinking of this book now, twenty years after I read it, I remember this boy toiling endlessly at practising his bowling. That’s obsession, eh?
Books about obsession are always interesting. Auto-da-Fé (1935), by Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994) and translated by C.V. Wedgewood, has the usual cautionary message about keeping an obsession under control, with a professor who dissociates from the real world and hears no voice other than his own. To quote from my review:
The professor goes for walks early in the morning before the bookshops open so that he won’t be tempted to buy any more – he already has a library of 25,000 books and anyway, the books in the bookshops are inferior and not worthy of him.
He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately, the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o’clock. (p11)
Something to bear in mind if the TBR is escaping its boundaries…
Sez she, who has no self-control whatsoever when it comes to the TBR. A recent purchase which enticed me is Chloé, by Katrina Kell. Appealing to my love of art and Paris, this novel reimagines the life of Chloé the person, the model for the iconic painting at Young and Jackson’s hotel where it has been on display since 1909. Kell’s MS won the Australian Society of Authors Award Mentorship for an unpublished novel, and she was mentored by Linda Jaivin who wrote The Empress Lover (2014) so I’m expecting it to be interesting.
So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month!
Next month (May 2024), starts with The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.
