Books and what is in them

These days I have enough spare time to respond to on-line questionnaires if I think the questions are worth while; a few weeks ago I responded to 2-3 rounds of questions on the editorial and features content carried by the Globe and Mail, the nearest we have to a national newspaper in Canada. The 'incentive' to complete the questionnaire didn't matter - it was the interesting questions that attracted me. But there was an incentive, a $200 book gift card.  Amazingly, my name was drawn and I won the $200 gift card! It's the first time ever in my life that I've won anything in a 'lottery' like this. I have about $200 worth of books on my "Wish List" with the online book shop Chapters-Indigo, so I'll cash in the gift card and get them all I think. Next time you are invited to respond to an online questionnaire that offers a chance to win an award like this, you might want to spare a few minutes to answer the questions, instead of just deleting it as I've usually done in the past. You never know: maybe you will win too. 

The past week has been a book bonanza -- and I still have over $100 credit to cash in. Two of the books I now own are fictional biographies if such a term exists, fiction based on the lives and careers of famous people. One is the second volume of Hilary Mantel's superb trilogy based on the life, times, actions and interactions with others, of Thomas Cromwell.  The first volume, Wolf Hall, was the first book on which I wrote comments in a post on this blog, in March 2010. At the time I thought it was the best historical novel I had ever read. The second volume, Bring up the bodies, is about Thomas Cromwell's role in the destruction of Anne Bolyn, and the shifting political alliances in and around the court of Henry VIII in those years. It is as historically accurate as Hilary Mantel can make it, it vividly describes the intrigues and violent actions we know about from the historical record, and just as important, it maintains the high literary standard of Wolf Hall - and as I remarked after reading that first volume, I hope I live long enough and remain sentient so I will be able to read the third and final volume too when it is published. My other newly acquired historical fiction is David Lodge's version of the womanizing ways of H G Wells, the prolific and prodigiously polymath public intellectual and writer who bestrode the early decades of the 20th century like a colossus. I first encountered him in my adolescence when I read his Science of Life and Outline of History. I think this was the first work on history that I read for pleasure and enlightenment and it led me directly to the library of historical monographs that I read to preserve my sanity while I was a medical student, trying to learn the bewildering new languages of anatomical and physiological terminology. I moved on to Wells's social novels, Kipps, Anne Veronica and a few others, all of which I enjoyed, and which opened my mind to important social issues, and his science fiction novels, War of the Worlds, Invisible Man, and Things to Come (which I found rather dull and implausible). I didn't know until years later that Wells was a notorious philanderer.  There is nobody better qualified to write about H G Wells than David Lodge - professor of English at the University of Birmingham and author of a hilarious and perceptive series of novels about contemporary academia. The book bonanza didn't end there.  I also got The social conquest of earth, E O Wilson's latest lament about the ways in which modern humans are destroying life-supporting ecosystems on this earth, the only home we humans have; and A universe from nothing, a philosophical work about the universe (Which addresses the tantalizing question, Why is there something rather than nothing?). So far I've had time only to glance at these last two books, but I can see I'm in for a major bout of my habit of reading several books all at the same time. Somehow my brain seems able to discriminate among them, and I am comforted to discover that I seem to be as able as ever I was to pick up the several separate threads as I move from one to another, moved by whim and my mood at the time. Wendy thought it was a bad habit because it meant sometimes that books she wanted to read too got stalled on my bedside table when she wanted to shift them to her bedside table. She never read more than one book at a time despite my frequent encouragement to her to adopt my sinful ways. I revel in these ways, though sometimes so many books pile up on the bedside table that they overbalance and fall to the carpet below. When that happens nowadays, I move them out if I haven't advanced through them in the past few months, out to a book shelf elsewhere in my apartment, or out of my life altogether if I think I will never come back to read the rest of a book, to find out how it ends.