december 2024 books...

Babel (RF Kuang): This is our Storysmith book group’s annual big-book-to-be-read-over-the-Christmas-holidays book (it’s 544 pages long!). It’s set in Oxford in 1836 (just a little before my time there!); Babel is the university’s prestigious Royal Institution of Translation – a “tower from which all the power of the Empire flows”. Robin Swift (orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian) is one of its students. At times (lots of times), it felt a little like reading Philip Pullman (‘The Golden Compass’ etc). Translation is the key to magic, as Kuang uses her genre (she was born in China, before moving to the US aged 4) to sharpen a historical investigation into colonisation, learning and power. Babel is the great Oxford translation institute in an alternative version of Victorian England, where translators hold the keys to the British empire. Every device and engineering technique there is, from steam trains to the foundations of buildings, relies on silver bars (complicated isn’t it!) enchanted with ‘match pairs’; words in two different languages that mean similar things, but with a significant gap between them. The bars create the effect of the difference: feelings, noises, speed, stability, colour, and even death. Bright children are taken from all corners of the empire, fluent in Chinese or Arabic, raised in England, and put to work at Babel to translate, thus finding new match pairs and making new magic – only ever used for the benefit of the rich in London, and to the detriment of those the translators must leave behind in their colonised homelands. We follow Robin Swift from his earliest childhood in China, through his time at Babel, and from his hope that translation is a way to bring people together, to the terrible realisation that, in this colonial framework, translation was an act of betrayal. It's an incredibly complicated, ingenious, wonderfully-researched novel written by very intelligent writer (and a translator herself) - with graduate degrees from both Oxford+Cambridge. I can’t do the book any justice in these few lines… but, once I’d got into it, I found it a convincing and gripping tale.
Voice-over (Norman MacCraig): I have to admit that I hadn’t come across MacCaig’s poetry until my good friend Chris had spoken of it. This is a book of comparatively short poems (some 58 of them), published in 1988. MacCaig (1910-96) was born in Edinburgh and was a conscientious objector during World War II. I very much enjoyed his poetry – I loved its succinctness, dark humour, simplicity of language and observation – and I often read them out loud to myself as the mornings emerged. I’ll no doubt delve back into this rather lovely book again over the coming years.
Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit (PG Wodehouse): Once again, I resorted to Wodehouse to try to get away from all the current troubles of the world… All the usual stuff: the author’s wonderful way with words (and dialogue) from a by-gone age; the ridiculous characters (eg. Stilton Cheesewright); the regular misunderstandings; Aunt Delia and her ‘Milady’s Boudoir’ magazine; the Drones Club; the frequent Wooster engagements/unengagements(?); and, of course, Jeeves – who always comes to the rescue, whatever the circumstance… not to mention, in this particular novel, Bertram Wooster’s attempt to grow a moustache. The ultimate comfort reading!
The Birmingham School (ed. Stephen Wildman): This is an exhibition catalogue (published in 1990) of paintings, drawings and prints by Birmingham artists from the city’s Art Gallery. The exhibition itself covered over 200 years of work by the ‘Birmingham School’ (a description I’ve struggled with) and rightly highlights Birmingham’s unique artistic heritage. For me, my main interest was the work produced in the first three (say) decades of the 2oth century. I had a reasonable knowledge (and admiration) of work by the likes of Joseph Southwell (1861-1944); Arthur Gaskin (1862-1928) and Maxwell Armfield (1881-1972), but the catalogue also triggered a desire to find out more about other artists, such as: Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893-1963); Alice Coats (1905-1978); Kate Bunce (1856-1927); Gerald Brockhurst (1890-1978); and Harold Holden (1885-1977). As an aside – although I wasn’t particularly taken by his art – one artist’s name made me laugh out loud: HHH Horsley (Hopkins Horsley Hobday Horsley)!!
Some Small Heaven (Ian Adams): Once again, I took my great friend Ian’s book as my spiritual guide through Advent. It explores a path through Advent, Christmas and Epiphany and seeks to discover the light within the darkness of winter through a series of daily reflections.
I’ve been using the book on a daily basis and, despite struggling on my faith journey this year more than most, I’ve once again found it a helpful/challenging way to start each day. I cheated a little immediately after Christmas this time and only continued my daily reflections for a couple more days, rather than to Epiphany. Powerful, beautiful and challenging (as always).
Note: 80 books read in 2024.