A little while back, ‘talking’ to an email friend, the exchange touched on Finnegan’s Wake and, by inference, Ulysses. I read both of these when I was in my late teens and, again, along with Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when I was in the RAF during my early twenties. And, it seems, not since then. Certainly not in the past 30 years or so since the Great Fire of Three Bridges, in which almost all my books were destroyed.
I was sitting thinking this morning, and got the urge to check a passage from Finnegan, reached up to my bookcase and, as has so often happened since the fire, found the books were not there. Gone. Dust to dust, or more accurately, pages to ashes.
Can’t be doing with that. I tapped over into Amazon and ordered all four volumes, along with the Edna O’Brien biography. Somewhere down in the giant tin book shop on the outskirts of Swansea, on our route to and from Sainsbury’s, a printer has whirred out a pick list and the appropriate labels and, like as not a cardboard box will be filled with my book order and dropped into the post late tomorrow or on Monday.
I was gratified to find that the total price comes to less than our weekly wine bill. All paper backs, of course. I don’t do hard backs much any more–far too expensive.
So that’s my summer reading taken care of. I’d better go through the pile of books on my desk, ‘waiting to be read’ and put the bulk of them back on the shelf. The remainder I’ll finish off between now and the start of outdoor reading weather in four to six weeks time. I like the idea of the coming season being the Summer of James Joyce.
Just out of curiosity I Googled the satellite view of the RAF camp where I lived the last time I had a Summer of James Joyce. The barrack block is still there, and the treed lawns where I lazed back then, reading under blue skies. I think that this time, rather than lounging on the grass, it’ll be my comfy wooden bench in the garden.
