Some More Recommended Reading
More recommended reading today! Some great recent nonfiction I very much enjoyed.
I’m going to start with Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) by British author Robert Macfarlane. I really enjoy good nature writing which is lucky for me, because we’re living in a golden age for that genre. Robert Macfarlane is one of the best.
This book talks about the spaces existing often unexplored under our feet. Caves. Ice chasms. Storage spaces. The underworld plays such a large part in our myths and legends and psyche, it’s interesting to go down and see what’s actually under there.
Just one proviso, I get quite claustrophic and the one time I did a cave tour, I had a panic attack, so a couple of particular chapters of this one creeped me out. It’s a credit to the strength of the writing and the power of the subject that I plowed on to the end!
One of the many things I love about reading books is that it lets me do things in my imagination that I’d NEVAH do in real life. You wouldn’t get me spelunking for all the tea in China, frankly! But I’m very curious to hear from people who put themselves at risk to see what’s down there in the dark! Macfarlane is such a vivid writer, you really feel like you’re there – in all the cold, clammy gloom!
My second choice of book is a bit of a homage to my teenage self. Like most of the Western world in the mid-1970s, I had a huge crush on the Fonz from Happy Days. It was quite a painful experience, because I was at boarding school with strict TV rules, so I only got to see my crush sporadically over holidays, rather than 5 nights a week like my lucky day girl friends.
Henry Winkler, who played that iconic role, always came across as a terrifically nice man and his 2023 memoir Being Henry: The Fonz…and Beyond, has only confirmed that opinion.
Back in my teenagerdom, I devoured any information I could get on HW. It became pretty clear that the real man was rather shy and self-doubting, unlike uber-cool Fonzie, who could get any girl he wanted with one careless click of his fingers.
This book is full of interesting and amusing stories about making Happy Days, but it’s also a surprisingly emotional read about a lost and rather unloved young boy who became the world’s idol for a few short years. Then a bewildering and unhappy interval followed when HW had to find his feet, once the rollercoaster of fame left him behind on the ground after the carnival was over. How’s that for some mixed metaphors?
An ongoing theme in the book is Winkler’s dyslexia and how it affected his life. Another is his ability to establish close and worthwhile relationships with people in his life, including his wife, his family, and his fellow actors.
I particularly enjoyed reading about the friendship he maintains to this day with his Happy Days colleague, Ron Howard, especially as the friendship had to overcome the stress of the putative star of the show (Howard) being completely upstaged by a character originally slated to be a bit player. The fact that the intimacy survived and thrived over the years is a credit to both men.
By the way, Ron Howard wrote a pretty good memoir himself called The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family. So pick that one up, once you’ve given the Fonz a go!
My last choice is a really recent read. I only finished it yesterday, in fact!
We’ve recently had the Brisbane Writers Festival here, and over the packed weekend, I went to a great session with a writer originally from Brisbane who now teaches at Oxford University.
Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist and lexicographer who has worked on the Oxford Dictionary. One magical day just before she left Oxford to take up a post at Stanford University in the U.S.A., she was down in the archives of the OED and she happened to discover an address book belonging to James Murray, the man largely responsible for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
This address book listed many of the volunteers who posted in definitions and quotes for the dictionary. What she found sent Ogilvie on a quest to discover what she could about these dedicated word fans. In fact, the book she wrote, The Dictionary People, has a wonderful subtitlte: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.
The book works its way through the alphabet in a most entertaining way, giving examples of all the magnificent variety of the volunteers. We have intriguing chapter headings like M for Murderers or C for Cannibals or V for Vicars. These often-obscure but intriguing people come to life in the pages, and I have to say a lot of them sound like they would have been great to meet! Well, a word nerd like me thinks so, anyway.
One of the most interesting facets of this book is how many of the people who contributed to the dictionary weren’t the great and the good (men) of Victorian society. They weren’t millionaires and professors and owners of great estates. Instead, we have a fascinating selection of outsiders to consider. Women seeking an outlet for intelligence and talents that conventional family life didn’t allow; people with a variety of mental health issues; oddballs and eccentrics.
I’m sure a lot of you have read The Surgeon of Crowthorne/The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. It turns out that the troubled Dr. W.C. Minor was far from the only interesting contributor to the OED! If you’re interested in words, the Oxford English Dictionary, Victorian life, and the rich variety of human life, I’d recommend this one.