Helping Hands

To my surprise I am positioned to finish The Ring and the Book ahead of the fasting month as I was hoping to do. In fact, I've already picked up Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam as alternative reading, a tome I've long had in my sights with two false starts under my belt, so my plan for a largely, possibly exclusively, Islamic-themed month seems to be falling into place.

The second half of Browning's masterpiece proved to be a much easier read than the first. I suppose it was a matter of getting acclimatised. But there also seems more variation between the books, allowing in more light. (I'm now on Book 11, the vicious Guido, again). The similarities between Books 2, 3 and 4 in terms of their following the story-line of the murders and what led up to them in similar chronological fashion created, for me at least, a sort of barrier of sheer repetition of detail. Mind you, I must admit that much as I enjoyed Book 10 in the company of the Pope I didn't quite follow the ebb and flow of the argument as well as I would have liked. I can see going back to it one day as a one-off exercise.

Two guys who deserve my gratitude in all this are Messers Collins and Altick the editors of my very handsome Broadview paperback. There are incredibly useful notes on almost every page - the Biblical cross-references alone add a rich dimension to one's reading - but they also give you room to develop your own reading by not in any way attempting to 'translate' the text. It's easy to overlook the importance of what goes on in academia in terms of ensuring texts are made available in accessible forms for ordinary readers. We never really read alone.