READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Day 1 I have accepted the challenge to post the cover of seven books that I love: no explanation, no review, just the cover. Each time I post a cover, I’ll ask a friend to take up the challenge.Meanwhile, here are 100 words on a word in the title: Dumps (June)  In the dumps, an idiom for the blues, extends to collective sense of despondency, unhappiness tending towards despair. It’s not despair, only a group sense of loss dictated by mood and circumstance. Dumps is a plural noun for rundown dwellings, neglected premises. For those on the street, this may be a packing case under the Brooklyn Bridge. In June it is shade, in January you could die in the snow. The verb explains this state of affairs. People dump on other people. People dump other people. They send them to a dump site, believing they’ve solved things. People dump responsibility.

Mention of ‘The Magic Pudding’ in List 1 prompted thought about ten influential children’s books, books that had an impact at the time, and still do. Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll): The main character is pure reason meeting the absurdity of the social world, making them adult books written to amuse, but usually confuse, children. We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (Maurice Sendak): All of his books are a gift, but I especially like this one because it dares to deal head-on with homelessness and the mistreatment of children, and how when we learn compassion things change. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame): A microcosm of Edwardian England, though I have wanted to write in heroic couplets a sequel where they all end up on the Western Front: Toad as an irresponsible idiot general, Ratty as a poetry-spouting captain, Mole as the private who goes ‘over the top’, and Badger as the army chaplain, epitome of English conscien...

 Since ‘My Brother’s Book’ came out posthumously this year, I have been reading it nearly every night. The book only takes five minutes to read. Over five, ten, fifteen minutes I find something new each time in ‘My Brother’s Book’. Because, reading is only one of the things we do with any book by Maurice Sendak. Really the main thing we do is look. We look at each page in turn, each change of line or colour or sequencing or display, in a way that cannot be done were ‘My Brother’s Book’ an e-book. Because reading a book by Maurice Sendak is a book experience. No one reads his books for the information. We don’t read his books in order to get to the end in order to read something else next. We read his books for every detail of word and picture, ready to refer back or forward to other pages. We don’t want to miss anything. We go down or, as happens in somewhat equal measure, up wherever the author goes. It is still not completely clear what this story is all about. It doe...