Thank God for tea (and coffee)!

 “Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.” (Sydney Smith 1771 – 1845)

I recently picked up a book called A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization by Kenneth F. Kiple at a warehouse book sale. That sale really was ‘overload’ even though I loved every minute of it. Piles of boxes stood at the door to the warehouse for you to take in with you. People were emerging from the inner labyrinth of books staggering under boxes filled to the brim, blinking in the bright daylight as if they forgot for a moment that there was a world outside which did not exist of isles and piles of books.

One thing that sales like these makes possible is for readers to easily – and quite cheaply – try out new genres, writers and basically anything that ‘looks interesting’. And if you end up not liking it? Well, you probably paid about R10 for it, so it’s much easier to part with at your local library. (I usually do this with books that I find are not quite in my taste – someone else is bound to like it and get some use out of it.) And The Movable Feast did look and sound interesting to me – how much do we really know about the history of the food we eat, after all?

Just a simple thing like my usual breakfast – muesli with yoghurt and coffee or tea with sugar and milk – turns into an exotic meal. The usage and spread of both tea and coffee (and the sugar that goes with it) is a fascinating read. (Though, I still prefer my coffee and tea with sugar and milk. Sugar I can still do without, but not the milk. No salt or butter for me, thank you, those are too exotic for my taste.)

On the days that I am unable to start with either a cup of tea or coffee, I always feel as if I’ve missed some important step in getting ready for work. And that nagging feeling will remain, leaving me to double check that I am not still wearing slippers, or forgot to brush my hair. I make my first cup at work while the computer is starting up and e-mail is loading. That way I can sit down, take a sip and focus my mind without any pesky coffee cravings drawing my attention away from the screen and towards the drawer where my stash of coffee and tea is kept.

And what better way to end a busy day than with a book and a mug of rooibos tea? 

The Rooibos plant

The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly

For this week's Ramblings of a Bibliophile, I've chosen The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly. Enjoy!

The Book of Lost Books - S. Kelly

The Book of Lost Books

While looking over the reference section in one of the local bookshops, the following title caught my eye: The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll never read. I picked it up to read the back cover and knew I had to read this book – and it was a very good buy. Stuart Kelly goes about describing the books many well-known writers planned to write, but never got the chance to write and books destroyed by fire, water or other means.

“Widsith spoke, unlocked his word-treasure, he who of all men had most widely travelled among all the nations and peoples of the world.” (Kelly 2010:101- translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Widsith”)

Some of the chapters in the book are: “Homer”, “Sophocles”, “Saint Paul” and “Widsith the Wide-travelled”. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Kafka and Philip K. Dick also make up part of the book, making it a treasure trove of the works of some of the greatest writers we only have a brief glimpse of.

Somewhat elegiac, the prose draws the reader in and makes every page enjoyable to read. Even if you are not familiar with some of the writers featured in The Book of Lost Books, Kelly still gives enough information to ensure that his readers are not lost between names and titles. When one looks at all the works that we know of that has been lost, it makes one more thankful for those works that have stood the test of time.

“This book, even in its expanded form, is still only the visible tip of the extravagant, glorious tragicomic universe of loss. That universe, like our own, is expanding.” (Kelly 2010:379)

I can highly recommend this volume from Polygon for any avid reader or bibliophile as Kelly covers so many different writers – there is bound to be at least one to suit every taste.

Goes perfectly with: A Caffé Latte on a rainy day.

Perfect size to: Keep in your handbag for those moments of stolen reading pleasure.

Rating: 4/5

Also visit: www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Kelly, Stuart. The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read. New Expanded Edition, 2010. Polygon Books, Edinburgh.

What I’m also reading at the moment: Bart Nel, by J van Melle & Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett and for studies: Myths of the Pagan North by Christopher Abram.