Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers by Thomas Mann

I’ve long had an interest in libraries and how they work, so when I saw this book on a research trip to the Library of Congress, I thought it would be sensible to do a bit of reading to learn more about the theoretical side of library work.

Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers by Thomas Mann

Most people who do research (myself most definitely included) tend to have set ways in which they search for information. I grew up at a time when the standard card catalogue was on its way out, but I can still remember going to the library in my childhood and learning how to search for the books I wanted by flipping through the racks and racks of little off-white, typewritten cards. As I grew older, searching for journal articles involved several large volumes entitled The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, or larger guidebooks on similar subjects. With the advent of computerised and finally online catalogues, searching for books and information became a matter of typing in specific words. But searching in these set ways often restricts the amount of information one can locate, and leaves entire avenues of available information unexplored.

The author of this book worked as a general reference librarian in the Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress, and his experience with how people go about their research seems to be put to good use in this book. Library Research Models describes several different set ways of thinking often used by researchers, examining and weighing the pros and cons of using each library research model. In doing so, Mann also explains how libraries are organised and books are arranged on shelves — understandably, the bulk of the explanation is given over to the organisation methods used by the Library of Congress and other large libraries that operate on the same principle. The different ways of conducting research can produce rather different results, and Mann takes the time to show just how a individual researcher’s mind might work, and what alternate methods might be tried to produce improved research results.

The only fault I can find with the book is really no fault of its own; having been written in 1993, there are more than a few sections that are…well, more than a little out of date. The sections that deal with computer technology reflect the fact that the book was written in the early 1990s, and a revised edition would surely have quite a bit more to say about the use of the online catalogues and the use of the Internet in information location. A revised edition might even have to split into two parts, one to deal with traditional methods of searching and one to focus solely on the use of the Internet as a point of reference. But as an introductory point of reference, without getting into the changes caused by the computer and the use of the Internet, Library Research Models seems a decent place to start. It certainly made me think more closely about how I go about looking something up in a list or a catalogue, and what kind of productive use I make of my time when I’m actually browsing deep in the stacks.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

I may be able to move back up to three review posts per week fairly soon, depending on how the backlog looks. Right now I have several reviews waiting to go, so it’ll be a matter of spreading them out and pacing them accordingly.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and mystery columnist for the Washington Post, knows the importance of examining and evaluating the books that she has read over the years. Books have been the centre of her life for a number of years now, so perhaps it is only natural that she would write a book that looks at her life as a reader and how certain books and genres have shaped her reading experience and her approach to life. And in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Corrigan attempts to explore her longstanding and complex relationship to the books in her life, from her early childhood favourites to the books she comes back to time and again as a adult. As she says in her oft-quoted introduction: ‘It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others –- even my nearest and dearest -– there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.‘ It’s a sentiment that a number of readers share, certainly.

Quite possibly the best section in the book is her paean to hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that she believes has been overlooked and underappreciated by critics and academics. Corrigan delves into the world of noir, the stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and provides some interesting insights into how the traditional detective novel’s perspective on class and society makes it a quintessentially American work of fiction. She also has a few words to say about what she calls the female version of the ‘extreme-adventure story’ — where the gruelling experiences and hardships of a man climbing a mountain or facing death on a battlefield are mirrored by a those of a woman fighting to escape an abusive husband or devoting her energies to caring for an elderly relative on her own. (I’m not quite sure that I agree with all of her thoughts on this subject, but I’m still attempting to figure out where my reservations come from.)

That said, it should be noted that Corrigan’s attempt to describe her passion for books and illustrate the influence of literature on her everyday life becomes increasingly strained the farther away she goes from the books. As the distance from the literary analysis increases, the more her prose starts to drag and the less careful her word choices become. In one section, the term ‘WASP’ — with all its vaguely perjorative connotations and its feel of inverted snobbery — shows up four or five times in about as many pages as Corrigan talks about her Irish-Polish Catholic childhood and heritage. I ended up barely skimming Corrigan’s account of her travels to China to meet and bring back her adopted daughter, and the section in which she recalls her feelings of disenchantment and isolation during graduate school had me biting my lip in exasperation by the end of it. I won’t go quite as far as Corrigan herself does by summing up her book with her suggestion for a one-word negative review if Leave Me Along, I’m Reading — ‘Gladly’ — but I do think that some book-centric memoirs such as Corrigan’s have a tendency to blur the line between the books and the memoirs a little too much for my liking at times.

Travels in Hyperreality, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, and On Literature by Umberto Eco

For today, here’s a handful of short reviews — three collections of essays and other short pieces by Umberto Eco, Italian professor of semiotics and author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco (1990)

The essays and pieces in Travels in Hyperreality often focus on Eco’s chosen field of semiotics, the study of signs and the ways in which meanings are made and understood through the use of signs and symbols. The ‘hyperreality’ that Eco refers to in the title essay is not exactly easy to explain, but in a way it can best be described by the figures in a wax museum: everything is made to be as life-like and realistic as possible, but done so in a way that the human eye and human brain cannot truly accept those wax figures as anything but fake. The long title essay looks at the hyperreality of wax museums, ‘Old West’ tourist towns, and Disneyland — in short, of many tourist attractions in America — with an intriguing academic detachment borne of many years of looking at how we as human beings define our reality.

The essays of Travels in Hyperreality were mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’re definitely dated by the examples he uses and the references he makes. Eco wonders in one essay what kind of reaction would result from an attack on a major sports field in the middle of a football game — it’s clear that the essay was written several years before the murder of the Israeli atheletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Readers who have little patience for Marxist interpretations of society might find certain essays problematic in that regard. But Travels in Hyperreality is for the most part just that: a collection of travels and accompanying observations about reality and about the aspects of life, both good and bad, that seem to be a little too real for comfort at times.

How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco (1994)

This book is a selection of various humourous essays and short story fragments written by Eco over the years, collected here in book form. The title essay opens the book, and in it Eco relates an odd tale of his attempts to keep a piece of fresh salmon in the mini-bar refrigerator of his London hotel room during a short stay in the city. (Not only was the attempt unsuccessful, but he also ended up with a staggering bill for all of the alcohol and beverages and nibbles he had to remove from the refrigerator in order to stuff the salmon into it each day — and he gained a bit of reputation amongst the hotel staff for extreme overindulging.) Most of the other essays are similar in tone, filled with wry observations on travel, modern technology, the weirdness of other human beings, and the busyness of everyday life in general. With subjects ranging from ‘How to Replace a Driver’s License’ (in Italy, apparently, this is almost an impossible feat) to ‘How to Buy Gadgets’ (a must-read for anyone who has boggled over a Sharper Image catalogue or one of those magazines found in the seat-pockets on airplanes), plus a few articles that are wicked parodies of nonsensical academic jargon and bureaucratese, there’s enough variety in the book to ensure that no one theme is repeated to the point of wearing out.

How to Travel with a Salmon is, I think, a very good short introduction to Eco’s brisk and clever writing style and his sense of sly and subtle humour. It definitely made me laugh out loud in places, and I spent much of the rest of the book trying and failing to keep a straight face. It’s also a very good travel book, since the essays are short enough to be read in little chunks and funny enough to be a welcome distraction from whatever craziness happens to be plaguing your immediate surroundings.

On Literature by Umberto Eco (2005)

Another collection of writings by Eco, all of a more literary and/or scholarly bent. Most of them were given as talks or written as papers for conferences, and the array of subject matter is extremely broad and…I think ‘erudite’ is probably the best word for it. There are essays about the literary style of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, observations on the use of style and symbolism in different authors’ works, an interesting essay which attempts to evaluate ideas of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ literature, and a rather critical one about the wit of Oscar Wilde (he doesn’t dislike Wilde’s aphorisms per se, but considers them more shallow and superficial than most people tend to think). More than a few of the essays, I freely admit, go over my head — primarily because in them Eco is discussing or making references to books I have not actually read or even heard of before. But they do pique my interest in the books he happens to be talking about, so perhaps one of these days I will come back to my copy of On Literature and find that something he’s written makes more sense to me at that point then it does right now.

One of the most interesting essays in this collection — my favourite, in fact — explains how he writes, or how he worked to develop the ideas for the works that he’s best known for writing (The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum in particular). The amount of time and effort Eco puts into his work really shows when he explains how he crafts his stories. One point in particular worth mentioning is how he tends to write dialogue in relation to time — if two people were walking down a corridor having a conversation, he says, and the conversation had to finish before they reached the end of the corridor, then he (as author) would have to figure out the length of the corridor so that he could time the length of the conversation in his head and adjust his characters’ walking speed accordingly. It’s this kind of detail that really make his work stand out. Speaking as someone who enjoys finding out what makes authors tick, it’s a pleasure to see in this collection of essays that Eco is also very much interested in learning about authors and the things that make them tick.

Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis by Simon Stow

As any good book reviewer ought to do, I will have to declare a prior interest in the author of the book I am about to review. I took several undergraduate classes in political philosophy from Simon Stow, and consider him to be one of the best professors I had during my undergraduate days. (Somewhere in my files, I still have the notes I took from his classes.) So when I saw that he’d published a book based on his dissertation, I thought it only appropriate to purchase a copy for myself and attempt to write a brief review of it.

Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis by Simon Stow

Most anyone who has made a serious study of the techniques of literary criticism will know that a number of long-established critics like to look at books through a decidedly political lens. Marxism, postmoderism, feminism, New Historicism — the list of these and other ‘isms’ is long and still growing, and often confusing for those who would prefer to simply read a book rather than try to look at the book with the help of a theory that is supposed to explain What It All Really Means. Yet in the past half-century or so, this political ‘turn’ in literary theory has been mirrored by a similar literary ‘turn’ in political theory, in which political philosophers examine certain works or styles of literature in an attempt to determine the effects that books and reading can have on the creation of political ideas. Political and social philosophers like Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Terry Eagleton, and Judith Butler have examined the relationship between books and readers, trying to develop theories that explain the proper or ideal role of literature in political thought.

The literary turn in political theory has produced some rather thought-provoking ideas. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, suggests that books like Charles Dickens’ Hard Times or E.M. Forster’s Maurice can help create a feeling of empathy and understanding for those who have been put at an economic, political, or social disadvantage by the current state of society, raising our political and social consciousness. Richard Rorty claims that reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire will help readers recognise cruelty when they see it, both in other people and in themselves. (He uses the seductively cruel paedophila of Humbert Humbert as a case in point: if readers of Lolita come to realise that they have started to accept Humbert’s claim that he was seduced by a prepubescent girl, would that sudden self-awareness make the readers more aware of their own capacity for cruelty or their ability to objectivise other people in the way that Humbert objectifies young Dolores Haze?) These and other ideas of the role of literature in political thought — and the thinkers who developed them — are the focus of Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis.

Stow’s book looks at the literary turns in the political thought of Nussbaum, Rorty, Eagleton, and Butler, and attempts to identify the common strands in their competing arguments. He devotes a good portion of the book to picking apart the inconsistencies and problems with these arguments — not necessarily to say that these arguments are entirely wrong, but more to show that some of the underlying assumptions in these arguments are very subjective, more often based on how Rorty or Eagleton or Nussbaum or Butler thinks that a particular work of literature should be read than on how a reader might look at the text for the first time. Stow points out this and other problems with the different textual readings and their applications to political thought, and in doing so he attempts to separate — or perhaps even rescue — political philosophy from literary criticism.

One word of caution: It helps to have a good acquaintance with literary and political theory before delving into this book. I myself have only dabbled in the shallows of political philosophy and literary criticism, so a reader who is less than familiar with either the theorists or the texts mentioned would likely find this book somewhat rough going. (Having had the advantage of sitting through the author’s lectures in the past, I was able to follow his arguments better than I think I would have otherwise.) But for students of philosophy and literature who are interested in a review of the literary turn in political thought — one that avoids the shrillness all too frequently found in this discipline’s debate — Republic of Readers? provides a calm and measured study that does quite a bit to heighten readers’ awareness of the role that literature often may play in shaping how we look at the world.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

This book has been defying my attempts to write a review it for the better part of a month and a half — but I think I’ve managed to emerge victorious at last.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

It’s a longstanding cliché that there are only really a handful of basic plots in the entire canon of Western literature. The cliché is so cliché that it’s somehow gone past cliché and come right out the other side in the form of a 700-plus-page analytical study by former Spectator columnist and Private Eye founder Christopher Booker. Booker suggests that storytelling serves to pass along moral lessons and models from the older generation to their children and successors, and as a result the basic lessons have coalesced over time into seven basic symbolic ‘plots’ that have formed the primary model for storytelling into the present day. These seven plots are as follows:

(1) Overcoming the Monster — Stories like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films, where a hero must defeat a monster and restore order to a world that has been threatened by the monster’s presence.
(2) Rags to Riches — These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, David Copperfield, and the Horatio Alger novels.
(3) The Quest — A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds, and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey is a classic example of this kind of story.
(4) Voyage and Return — Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more.
(5) Comedy — Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace.
(6) Tragedy — As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident.
(7) Rebirth — The stories of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world.

Within these basic plots are smaller ‘metaplots’ that outline the general structure of these stories. Booker further identifies ‘dark’ versions of these basic plots, ones in which the happy ending is never achieved even though the characters go through all of the stages in the underlying metaplot. There are also a handful of other, smaller plots that are often incorporated into these larger overarching plots, such as the ‘Rebellion’ plot or the ‘Mystery’ plot. Booker looks at both plots and characters, identifying heroes and heroines and the figures who both help them (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Good Mother, the Companion) and hinder them (e.g., the Dark Rival or Alter-Ego, the Temptress, the Tyrant). If many of these character figures sound like basic story archetypes…well, Booker says, that’s because they are. And he’s dedicated the entire book to determining and explaining how these combinations of plots and characters come together to create some of most well-known (and dare I say, archetypical) stories in the literary canon.

I’ve read quite a few reviews of The Seven Basic Plots, and most of them seem to say some variation on the same theme: The first 300 pages or so are great, but the book goes rapidly downhill from there. These negative reviews touch on the primary trouble with the The Seven Basic Plots. When a particular story does not seem to fit into the established patterns of Booker’s Jungian worldview, his seven basic plots, he immediately declares that the story is irrevocably flawed, defective, or otherwise a perversion of how stories ought to be. As a result, a significant portion of the literature written since about 1800 falls into this flawed or defective category — including stories such as Moby-Dick (because we don’t know whether the real Monster to be overcome in the story is the white whale or Captain Ahab) and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (because he regards the main character, Julien Sorel, as little more than a portrait of egotistical cruelty and selfish ambition for fame and glory). Not even The Lord of the Rings, one of the stories that Booker points to as the ultimate example of his basic plot archetypes, is free from imperfections: Frodo remains an incomplete character because he never finds the feminine half that he needs to become a whole character. In cruder terms, he doesn’t ‘get the girl’, and therefore can never be complete, so he has to sail away as an incomplete and unresolved main character. Booker also has a disturbing prediliction to blame the author’s background for the flaws of his (or, on very rare occasions, her) stories — usually, in true Jungian fashion, by hinting at unresolved mother issues or sexual identity woes. Very rarely does he attempt to look at the story itself or attempt to understand why the author chose to break away from these archetypes. Without them, the author is flawed and the story is flawed, and as a result there is little room for debate.

It’s really a shame that Booker’s methodology falls apart through his sheer insistence on clinging to Jung. It would’ve been a far more fascinating study to explore why certain stories rebel against or subvert these archetypes, and how this deliberate rebellion or subversion makes these stories all the more powerful for the reader as a result. His writing style is an absolute model of clarity and careful word choice, making The Seven Basic Plots seem far less unwieldy for the general reader than its physical bulk might suggest. In the end, Booker’s magnum opus is certainly worth exploring by those who take an interest in the history of storytelling and in the underlying themes that define so many of our best-loved tales. I’m glad that I read it, in the end.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

From a short review to a quite long one, to round out the month of October.

The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis

The Discarded Image was the last book that C.S. Lewis wrote, and in essence it summarises a number of lectures and talks he gave on the subject of Medieval and Renaissance Literature — the subject he taught for the greater part of his lifetime. The ‘image’ in question is a complete and complex picture of history, science, and theology that served as the foundation for literature in the Western world from the turn of the first millennium A.D. up until around the early 1600s. In the space of a little over 200 pages, Lewis picks this intricate and detailed image apart to show the pieces that make up the whole, before putting everything back together again to point out the places where the whole contributed to how authors, historians, philosophers, and religious writers wrote about the various facets of the world they knew.

Explaining the entirety of the book would be tedious and would force me to set aside an interesting and noteworthy point. As with the majority of Lewis’s non-fiction writings, it’s very easy to see how his scholarly research and religious studies influenced the worlds he created — not just Narnia and its inhabitants, but also the planets of the Space Trilogy, the bureaucratic Hell of The Screwtape Letters, and even the twilight town and pre-dawn countryside of The Great Divorce. One quote in particular reminded me of different aspects of the fiction I’ve read:

[in a discussion of how man can have Free Will if God is omniscient]

Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.

I’m reminded here of Aslan’s comment to Lucy in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’: ‘I call all times soon’. But something of this is also present in Screwtape’s comments to Wormwood about the restricted ways by which tempters can influence the free will of a ‘patient’, and also (I believe) is hinted at in The Great Divorce when the spirit of George MacDonald is talking to Lewis’s Dantean avatar about choices and decisions. This is only one passage of several that illustrate ideas and thoughts that Lewis drew upon in his world-creation, or so it seemed to me when I was going through the book on my initial read-through.

Far be it from me to attribute all of Lewis’s writings to ideas covered in this particular book. Yet Lewis fans will likely find it a treat, even though it is probably best enjoyed if you have at least read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales beforehand. I’ll end this review with a second quote from the book, one which is near the end and which rather nicely sums up the underlying structure of the book’s thesis:

It follows that the book-author unit, basic for modern criticism, must often be abandoned when we are dealing with medieval literature. Some books — if I may use a comparison I have used elsewhere — must be regarded more as we regard those cathedrals where work of many different periods is mixed and produces a total effect, admirable indeed but never foreseen nor intended by any one of the successive builders.

I’m not familiar enough with a wide spread of medieval and Renaissance literature/history/philosophy/religious writings to judge this statement on my knowledge alone. But from what I’ve read and from what others (who are far more knowledgeable about this subject than I am) have told me, Lewis was most definitely an expert in his field and his observations are spot-on.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

Dipping into the ‘wide high-table λόγος of St. C.S. Lewis’s Church’, as Betjeman so sardonically put it once upon a time. I’ve a few reviews of his other works that will have to go up here at some point, but this book really needs to stand by itself.

An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

It’s common enough to talk about ‘good books’ and ‘bad books’, and yet the definition of what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a book has as many variations as there are readers. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was a runaway bestseller, but bring it up in conversation and you might well be scoffed at for even mentioning that kind of paperback junk food. Harold Bloom has made a name for himself declaring that Stephen King’s books (and most any other work of so-called popular fiction) are beneath contempt and beyond the pale for those who consider themselves to be ’serious’ readers. And the ‘adult’ UK editions of Harry Potter, intended for those who are shy about being seen on Tube or train with the brightly-coloured covers of the regular books, would seem to indicate that the sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ extends into children’s literature as well. It is the question of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ books that C.S. Lewis addresses in his short work An Experiment in Criticism: he looks at how people judge the literary value of a given book, examining in particular how (in his opinion) most judgements focus too much on the book itself and not on the way in which the book is read.

An Experiment in Criticism, at first, seems designed to make the curious reader wince within the first five pages. From the start, Lewis draws a very sharp line between the ‘literary’ and the ‘unliterary’ reader, and deliberately places the literary reader in a kind of close-knit elite. He soon identifies the kind of books that the unliterary reader is likely to read, if indeed that reader even picks up a book at all: romance-laden short stories in women’s magazines or sensationalist adventure novels, for instance. Unliterary readers will almost never read a book again if they’ve read it once before. They turn to reading as a last resort — to help them sleep at night, or to pass time on a long journey, or simply to kill time before something else happens. Most of all, the unliterary reader almost never talks about the book afterwards, except to pass some sort of superficial judgement on it: ‘I liked it’ or ‘It was boring’. But Lewis does not suggest that unliterary readers are unliterary because they look at books from this perspective — rather, he believes that unliterary readers do not look at books from any other perspective. His interest lies more in how literary readers look at books, and how their particular prejudices influence how books are appraised and either praised or condemned.

For instance, science fiction and fantasy are two genres that tend to be dismissed by literary readers as poorly written escapist tripe, or in general as stories meant only for children (and therefore ‘childish’ or otherwise unsuitable for a serious reader). Lewis suggests that the literary reader should only use ‘childish’ in this derogatory sense to mean behaviours and attitudes that are or should be left behind in childhood. In this sense, throwing a temper tantrum when frustrated or angry is childish; enjoying engaging, powerful, and well-written fantasy stories, regardless of their popularity or trendiness, is not. An Experiment in Criticism, in this regard, takes a step back from specific criticism and looks at the critics themselves, picking apart how and why people judge books and looking more closely at the superficial judgements that literary readers are themselves capable of making about certain books and those who read them.

Fans of C.S. Lewis’s writings will quite possibly get a good deal of enjoyment out of An Experiment in Criticism, I think, if they are willing to overlook some of his more prickly (and, I will admit, condescending) moments. But the point of the book is not so much to pass a lasting and final judgement on how books ought to be criticised. It is an experiment in literary criticism — and in that sense, it throws out a number of intriguing ideas and serves as a starting point to open the subject to a much wider debate.

The Stories of English by David Crystal

A quick note for readers who happen to come across this post in future — don’t hesitate to leave a comment on my reviews, even if you happen to be coming across a review some time after I originally posted it. I do like hearing what other people think of my book reviews…if for no other reason than the fact that it helps me learn how I can write better ones. Thanks for reading!

The Stories of English by David Crystal

The old joke about the ‘purity’ of the English language is that it is anything but pure — it has a distinct tendency to not only borrow words from other languages, but also on occasion to chase other languages down dark alleys, club them unconscious, and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. English is a constantly changing, constantly mutating language, and unlike many other languages there are certain facets of English spelling and grammar that make next to no sense to anyone attemping to learn the language. Forget about the irregular verb conjugations and peculiar plurals; students of English have to wrap their heads around the fact that enough, bough, through, and thorough can look very similar but sound entirely different. Sooner or later, the question tends to arise: how and why did the English language get so weird?

David Crystal’s The Stories of English makes a masterful attempt to answer that question, and in the process provides a history of English that is more engaging and fascinating than the history of a language almost has any right to be. He traces the history of English back through the history of the British Isles and weaves together the stories of the many groups of people who have left their mark on English over the centuries. The native Celtic languages; vernacular Latin and church Latin; the Saxon, Norse, Danish, and French of various invaders; the different tongues of the tradesmen who carried goods back and forth across the Channel, the independent development of native dialects and spellings — all of these affected the formation of English and left marks on the spoken and written forms of the language. And as English-speakers left the islands and travelled across the oceans, the language went with them and took on new dimensions: examples Crystal uses include American English, Australian English, and South African English. Crystal’s book is packed full of anecdotes and interludes that embellish his longer narrative, dipping into such wide-ranging topics as the creation of pat phrases like ‘last will and testament’, precisely what happened to the distinction between the formal and informal you (which many other languages have and English does not), and the classification of accents and speech markers as indications of good breeding. Even tricky explanations of complicated grammar patterns and nonstandard spellings are clear and straightforward (in plain English, even), and the chapters are short enough to make them easy to go back and reread them if you feel that you haven’t quite grasped his point or understood his meaning as well as you’d like.

One of the nicest features of The Stories of English, in my opinion, is that Crystal helpfully provides his readers with links to other, related sections of the book. If he happens to be discussing something that is related to a topic he has already covered or even has yet to mention, there will often be a parenthetical link to the appropriate page right there in the text. In a book that covers as vast and as complex a topic as the growth and development of the English language, these parenthetical links are an absolute godsend. Plus, they also offer a perfectly good excuse for skipping ahead if you really want to finish Crystal’s train of thought, or going back if you want to refresh your memory about a part you’ve already read.

The Stories of English isn’t just a book for linguists or literary historians. Anyone with even the most basic interest in why English is the way it is could benefit from flipping through the pages and seeing what’s inside. I constantly found myself stopping and shaking my head in wonder as I followed the different twists and turns in the development of the language. And best of all, I have to say, is the knowledge that the book doesn’t really end when you finish the last page. The stories of English are still being told, still changing and developing as more and more people use English as their primary language of communication. If you’re reading this book review on a computer screen, then you too are part of the newest chapter of one of the many stories…and best of all, no one really knows if or how these stories will ever end.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

I once had the amazing good fortune to meet Cambridge historian David Reynolds, and I think I flummoxed him a little (in the good way) when I told him straight off that I was a great fan of his work. Britannia Overruled is a classic reference text for anyone interested in studying Anglo-American relations, and Rich Relations is an intriguing look at Anglo-American relations during the ‘American occupation of Britain’ in World War II. So perhaps in keeping with his Anglo-American theme, Reynolds’ book focuses on a true Anglo-American output — Winston Churchill — and more specifically, Churchill’s impressive six-volume history of the Second World War.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War by David Reynolds

One of the quotations often attributed to Churchill is the pithy and somewhat flippant declaration: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Brave words from any politician, but in a sense Churchill really did write the history that would later lionise his name. After the Conservative Party’s massive defeat at the polls in 1945, Churchill was left as the Leader of a tiny Opposition and faced with the need to earn some kind of income to offset the extremely high tax rates that the Labour Party had recently imposed. With reams of personal papers at his disposal — as well as a number of highly sensitive government documents that just happened to have come with him when he left Downing Street — he set out to write a detailed history of the war that had just been won.

There’s been so much written about Winston Churchill from just about every possible angle, from admiring hagiographies to damnation with only the faintest of praise. Reynolds’ approach to this study of Churchill after the war is both novel and utterly fascinating. Churchill is as much a larger-than-life figure in this day and age as he was during his lifetime…and so there’s something terribly human about a Churchill who is desperate to cut a good deal with his publishers, hoping to secure an advance on his writing to prevent having to sell his beloved Chartwell, or a Churchill who is worried that he might (A) die or (B) win the next General Election (both of which seemed to be equally unwelcome possibilities) before he can finish the next volume of his book. It’s a side of Churchill that isn’t often seen, even by historians.

Reynolds writes with equally painstaking detail about the writing process, picking through multiple drafts and identifying selections that were cut out to avoid offending living politicians or relationships with Britain’s allies, or even to conceal vital state secrets such as the truth about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. It’s history at the nitty-gritty level, writing about the history of history being written — and in being written, how that history shapes people’s perceptions of the very immediate past and perpetuates that image into the future. It’s certainly not a surprise that the book won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, because Reynolds proves that it is indeed possible to write a history book that can appeal to historians and ‘lay readers’ alike. As he says in his introduction, ‘…Churchill the historian has shaped our image of Churchill the Prime Minister’, and In Command of History deftly illustrates how successful Winston Churchill actually was in writing the history that would later be so kind to him.

Link: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope’

As I was dredging my hard drive earlier today, I came across a PDF file that I’d downloaded and saved more than three years ago and seem to have completely forgotten about since then. Seeing as how it directly pertains to the title of this blog, I’d be a fool not to post it — so here’s the original file at its original location.

Peter Catterall: ‘The Prime Minister and His Trollope: Reading Harold Macmillan’s Reading’ (Cercles Occasional Papers No. 1)

This is the sort of research that I really enjoy — finding some obscure half-detail on your subject and realising that it might be worth chasing after, and then discovering that you can actually produce a tidy piece of research from it. (In typical Catterall style, the footnotes are well worth reading in their own right.)

- SG