Happy Monday, everyone!
Summer is definitely over now, and with it the pleasure of life opening up again after the Covid-19 restrictions. The numbers of people admitted to hospital and dying are slowly rising, here in Belgium and also across much of Europe. It all feels as if we’re in March 2020 again – but this time, with all the Brexit highlights of 2019 thrown in: the dire warnings, the impending deadline, the uncertainty over whether agreement between the UK and the EU can be achieved, the fear that it won’t.
So I’m back to checking the news every five seconds and I note that I haven’t read much over the last few weeks, though I have started a lot of books. A noticeable exception was the latest instalment in Christelle Dabos’s fantasy quartet: The Memory of Babel.
This series, The Mirror Visitor, is set on what might be Earth in the future, after an event called the Rupture which has split the planet into many pieces, called Arks. The Arks float in a shared atmosphere and each one has a presiding Family Spirit, who has special Powers, some of which can be inherited by their offspring. Ophelia, an unassuming archivist, is able to ‘read’ objects with her hands as well as to bring them to life; she also has the more unusual ability to travel through mirrors. To her surprise, a marriage is arranged between her and Thorn, the arrogant, rude Treasurer on the icy Pole Ark. What is the purpose of this marriage?
Unravelling this and associated mysteries brings Ophelia repeatedly into danger as she explores the origins of the Arks and the Spirits themselves. The books unspool at a tremendous pace and are quite complex (I had to reread the first two because I had forgotten so many important details). There is steam punk, a floating city, people who can fold space or create illusions as real as reality, a nightclub in the catacombs, murders, disguises, doubles, a circus, an animated woolly scarf. Reading, libraries and books are of central importance and I feel convinced that the secrets of the world’s origins are going to be quite meta. I’ll have to wait at least a year to find out!
I have also decided to avoid a Leonard Bast demise and put away some of my books. For a while now, I’ve been havering between two positions: (1) I love all my books and will not be parted from them and (2) I don’t really care about most of my books and am too weighed down by materialism and the need to possess things – let me bet rid of them all! I have read with admiration of people purging their bookshelves down to a core of books they really love, and have looked enviously at other people’s extensive book collection while re-reading a book I’ve had for thirty years.
Since we have an attic, I finally decided to take the easy way out, not make a proper decision and put some books into boxes up there. Then I spent months on and off wondering which books to keep up there. It seemed better to emboxen whole categories of book, rather than skim through the shelves and pick out some I thought myself less likely to re-read in the near future (which might then languish for ever). This past weekend I finally did it. Books that went up there: most of my old children’s books (though by no means all) and what I call ‘girly fantasy’ (Patricia McKillip, Theodora Goss, Peter Beagle, etc.). Detective fiction may also go up there.
Behind the piles of books I found some forgotten treasures lurking on the shelves! This was an unexpected bonus.
But now, gazing at the wall o’ books in the sitting room, I am bitterly regretting the impulse a few years ago that made me re-shelve my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. It’s actually not very practical AT ALL. I want to return to alphabetical order! However, I do not think I can face the massive task of re-shelving once more...
(Gratuitous painting by the Napolitan artist Colantonio of St Jerome in his study; obviously the lion is the best bit but St Jerome is almost as untidy as I am; painted 1445–6 and now in the National Museum of Capodimonte; found here)