An inventory
The following books read on holiday:
* The Murder Room – PD James
* Mansfield Park – Jane Austen.
Detailed entries on these two to come.
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The following book started on holiday:
* Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination – Robert MacFarlane
This is very promising. It details not so much the history of mountains but the history of humanity's relationship with them, and imaginative view of them. I found a lot of parallels with walking the coast path, not least in the following sentence:
A disjunction between the imagined and real is a characteristic of all human activities, but it finds one of its sharpest expressions in the mountains. Stone, rock and ice are significantly less amenable to the hand's touch than to the mind's eye, and the mountains of the earth have often turned out to be more resistant, more fatally real, than the mountains of the mind. As Herzog discovered on Annapurna, and I discovered on the Lagginhorn, the mountains one gazes at, reads about, dreams of and desires are not the mountain one climbs. These are matters of hard, steep, sharp rock and freezing snow; of extreme cold; of a vertigo so physical it can cramp your stomach and loosen your bowels; of hypertension, nausea and frostbite; and of unspeakable beauty.
So this is repaying reading, as I hoped it would. More about it in due course.
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The following books bought on holiday, some at Tregenna Place Books, a marvellous second-hand bookshop and coffee shop that opened in August in part of the Post Office building. It has a very extensive stock, and I really hope that it survives, it is a great addition to the town. The other bookshop I like in St Ives, and can rarely leave without having bought something, is St Ives Booksellers, at the bottom of Fore Street. Bearing in mind that I had to get everything home in the one rucksack, buying books was a risky business and I'm glad that I didn't have to carry the finished result further than between a few station platforms.
The purchases:
* The Alphabet – David Sacks
* The War Against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad – John Simpson
* Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
* Work – Louisa May Alcott
* The Far Pavilions – MM Kaye
* My Autobiography – Charlie Chaplin
* The Lifted Veil – George Eliot (Penguin 60s edition)
* A Taste of Life – Sara Paretsky (Penguin 60s edition)
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A film finally seen at the St Ives Royal: Wimbledon. A smashing independent cinema which we had been meaning to go to for a while. The film: a great story about tennis spoiled by all that romantic nonsense, in my opinion. Still, I might try to come up with a more intelligent view.
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Exhibitions seen while at St Ives:
* Work by Trevor Bell, landscape photography from Jem Southam and site-specific work from Toby Paterson (ie decorating the walls) at the Tate St Ives. Also the Bernard Leach-inspired pottery display is back in its old location.
* The usual members' exhibition at St ISA
* Grace Gardner retrospective at St ISA's Mariners' Gallery