The Reading of Old Books
Lamb Chopped
Shipmate
in Heaven
As the result of a really weird series of events in my personal life, I've started (again) reading old books--I'm on Athanasius now, a little bit every day. Before that came Julian of Norwich and Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (The Faith of a Physician) from the 1640s. I also read Theologia Germanica, but would recommend against it--super annoying.
Is anybody else out there reading old books? What? And what would you recommend, and why?
Is anybody else out there reading old books? What? And what would you recommend, and why?
Comments
Really would like to read The Iliad and the Odyssey, but have tried and failed multiple times. But who knows, maybe this is the year to give it another shot! Would appreciate recommendations for really readable translations. Even graphic novel versions might be helpfu l!
FWIW I am trying to make myself get back into spending more time reading books, rather than screens. While the dedicated ereaders are a nice compromise, especially for enlarging font size, I find myself becoming more comfortable with printed books as well.
As to why, well, TBH, I find myself needing to stay off the news feed so as to avoid walking around all day with tears of outrage constantly flowing, which helps no one.
As for The Iliad and The Odyssey I've been recommended E V Rieu's translations and, again, I have them on my shelf awaiting my attention.
I revisit Dame Julian on a regular basis.
To me "old" books can also mean re-reads of favourites, and I do that pretty regularly. Robert Harris's Pompeii is a favourite. Also the classic The Wind In the Willows and the Narnia books.
"Demon Copperhead" wasn't awful, but the premise really wore thin after a couple of chapters. I'm not sorry I read it, but unlike the original, I know I'll never read it again. Whereas I revisit David C. once a year and always look forward to reencountering my role model, Aunt Betsey Trotwood!
I had started to reread emile brunners "the mediator" before 2024 got really horrible and my brain couldn't cope.
I wouldn't really count these as old as such, more "not contemporary" or even "not very recent".
Those translations could themselves count as 'old'. Just checked my copy of that translation of The Iliad, and it was printed in 1950. Still pretty good, mind you. Not a verse translation, but well-chosen poetic (and not flowery!) language.
I've been re-reading John Buchan recently. Think that probably counts, given that the last one I read was originally published in 1922 (my 15th edition published 1932). Some of the reason I read them is the lovely way old books smell. In the case of Buchan it's also because his writing is such that I can see the places he's describing and hear the voices as I read. In several of his works I can easily walk where his characters do, since he lived in the next village out from the part of the cattle-crossing my parents live in and set sections of books nearby (The Blanket of the Dark is all local).
Dante (especially the Sayers translation and commentary) and Spenser and Milton and Chaucer, for more recent.
Everything by C.S. Lewis, though I don’t consider him old. Charles Williams and Tolkien too, of course.
Chesterton and George MacDonald.
Howard Thurman and Evelyn Underhill are also good, but not so old (mid-20th century).
My first experiences of 'old' books was, as a child, finding at home, a couple of bound volumes of Strand Magazine of the late 1880s. Among the delights I found in there were lots of Sherlock Holmes stories, as Arthur Conan Doyle was a frequent contributor. I blame that for my addiction to detective novels & TV series. There was also at home a Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw. I read my way through both the the Strand Magazines and the plays of GBS at around 11 or 12 years old.
Arnold Bennett was an early favourite, as was Galsworthy (following the TV serialisation of The Forsyte Saga in the late sixties). I was introduced to Hardy and Dickens and George Eliot at school, and continued reading them at intervals for many years, although I have only read the shorter works by Eliot and never got round to Middlemarch. I started reading the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen in my twenties.
My peak reading years were the 1980s & 90s, but was almost exclusively reading authors of the period.
I returned to C19 during the early years of this century, going back to old favourites plus Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins , but by the end of the first decade I was finding reading a bit of a struggle, and currently barely read at all, and certainly not books.
My most recent acquisition was a copy of Elizabeth and her German Garden, which has no author's name in it anywhere, but the internet tells me that it was written by Elizabeth von Arnim, who also wrote The Enchanted April.
I have also enjoyed a few of the 'evangelical' novels of Mrs O F Walton. I was given A Peep Behind The Scenes as a Sunday School prize in the mid 1950s, and have very fond memories of the tears I shed reading it. Then in the mid sixties our old church house was demolished for a new church to be built, and a shelf full of books by the Religious Tract Society dating back to the turn of the century (judging by the bindings, sadly undated, and by a bookplate in one dated 1910) which were being cleared out. I begged a few of these, and also picked up the occasional volume of that type from those old bookshops. Most were culled when we moved house , but I have kept Mrs Walton's Christie's Old Organ and Audrey, or Children of Light, also The Lamplighter, by Mrs Cummins, but this last has such close and tiny print that I never attempted to read it.
My dad used to sing john Ireland setting of Masefields "sea fever".
The BBC adaptation of his children's book "the box of delights" is quite the festive classic too.
After that, I move waaaaaay up to 1909 for Maurice LeBlanc's The Hollow Needle, which I am almost finished. After that, I plan to read Baroness Orczy's Lord Tony's Wife (1917). Most everything else on my to-read shelf is probably less than 100 years old.
For those of you considering The Iliad and The Odyssey, may I recommend The Aeneid? Gripping stuff, if you can find a decent translation.
Reading around the brand new "Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders" by Martin Achatz. How could I turn down a book with a poem titled "Bigfoot has Late Fees at the Carnigie Library." New but charming and thoughtful enough that it's still worth mentioning.
@Roseofsharon I just read Enchanted April recently. Loved it almost as much as the movie.
I also really like Caroline Alexander's free verse version of the Iliad.
(Both Wilson's iambic pentameters and Alexander's free verse seem to me to work far better than the loose six beat line that seems to be the standard for Homeric translation and feels to me to fall between the two stools.)
Then I read them in a children's edition called "Classic Starts," which basically puts the whole story into very readable prose for beginning readers.
Sounds really silly, I know! But -- once I read through the basic *stories,* it all made way more sense, and now I'm much more confident about my ability to read the actual books!
Yesterday I got the Lombardo translation of the Iliad from my local library and am already through the first couple of chapters - and that mental block seems completely gone!
Sometimes my "inner child" is actually useful!
Do you remember which verse translation you used?
That sounds like a sensible way of doing things to me!
I wish I could find such a "translation" for a book a friend recommended me--the ideas are clearly good and useful, but the prose is defeating me--and I with an English doctorate!
OMG what was your specific major? (Like, literature from a particular place/time, etc., or—?)
What book?
Awesome!!
Thanks!
It was good to see Trollope mentioned above as it's years since I've read any of his books, which I first encountered in a Victorian Literature course, so today I borrowed "Can You Forgive Her?" from the library today. It's the first book in the Palliser series.
‘Tristram Shandy’ is often praised for its playful parody of the novel form, but I also love the book for its deep humanity. Particularly the friendship between Uncle Today and his manservant (and ex-comrade-in-arms) Corporal Trim. One of those novels where one really loves the characters.
I like latchkeykids’s mention of ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ - it is, I suppose, the oldest possible book that one can read. How privileged we are that it’s available in Penguin Classics.
Rereading Fraser's Golden Bough right now. Forgot how dense it is.
AFF
I discovered the Near Eastern myths later in life, but find them fascinating as well.
That all counts as 'recent' to me ...
I may start on 'The Philokolia' during Lent.
I've read both 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' fairly recently but can't remember which translation but it didn't seem that difficult a read, but then I was familiar with the stories from kids' versions I'd read as a boy.
I've got a copy of Donne's sermons and I'd like to get into those. I've only dipped in and out.
(*“Preached at the Earl of Bridgwater’s House in London, at the Marriage of his daughter, the Lady Mary, to the eldest son of the Lord Herbert of Castle-Island, November 19, 1627.”)
Thanks! I should see if I can find a kids version of something by Trollope. People are always telling me they think I'd enjoy him, and they may be right. But as with the Iliad, I've had difficulty getting into it.
(David Copperfield, however, I read in its entirety at a young age, adored it, and have tried to reread it once every year or two since. I always make sure I have plenty of time to get from the beginning to "Janet! Donkeys!" before taking a break. Aunt Betsey Trotwood is my hero!)
with a comics library in a caravan. We could either buy or swap comics. He always had a good supply of them. Our local stationery shop where we bought our usual comics ("Princess" and "Eagle") didn't sell them, possibly because they were more expensive.