Blippin’ books

Leaving the UK in January 2018 I was unable to bring many of my books with me. When I finally closed my storage locker in the UK in early March this year I had to abandon many cherished books to the charity shop due to the limited space in the car (we drove / Eurotunneled from Munich to lovely Luton.) As the days draw away from that day of decision I am saddened at my panicked triage of which books to save and which to surrender.

Fortunately I have a catalogue of the books that I had collected over the years. So to continue my vice of expending money on buying books and actually reading some of them, I’m raiding AbeBooks almost every month to try and rebuild my library.

Three items I have acquired recently are books published just after the turn of the last century. I likes old smelly second hand books.

Rudyard Kipling’s Traffics and Discoveries was the easiest read and most amusing of the three once I got used to his cadence. I liked his use of the vernacular for some of his characters. Modern readers might find some words offensive as a number of the stories are set in turn of the 20th century
Southern Africa. Memories drifted through my mind when he mentioned the likes of Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Bulawayo, Salisbury (Harare), Mozambique and Nyasa, places I had lived or visited as a child.

Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles M. Doughty was written in the late 19th century: the forerunner to my purchased edition brought out of obscurity by T. E. Lawrence in 1921. The text has been
described as “archaic” by some of the reviews I have read, and it is certainly difficult reading. Most of the text provides a very interesting and historic view of the Arab peoples from an Englishman’s
view, pre oil. It’s taken me almost a month to get through just over 100 pages of the 600+ page Volume 1, but I’m sticking with it.

Beowulf, edited by W. J. Sedgefield was a typical inattentive purchase by me. Expecting to be able to read an English translation of the saga, I find I now have to go all the way back to my possible Anglo
Saxon roots in order to read this edition of the book!

I regularly have two or more books on the go, four at the moment. Inattention and easily distracted are a couple of traits associated with the ADHD condition. Lets find some more.