On The Radar: Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, Trevor’s repackaged short stories and Miller’s only novel

“On the Radar” provides small incidental rundowns on books which I’ve discovered, but haven’t yet purchased. These are titles which I’ve either added to my wishlist, or am keeping a close eye on with a view to adding them. In addition, these are books which I feel may be of some interest to fellow readers, and I welcome feedback as always, on your own opinions and thoughts on the listed titles – especially if you’ve already had the ‘pleasure’ of reading them.

The Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft – As a moderate fan of H. P. Lovecraft I’ve seen this Gollancz publication around the Net quite a few times. But I’ve never actually held one in the flesh. Or at least I hadn’t until a couple of weeks ago, when I was strolling around the Edinburgh branch of Waterstones and stumbled across a copy in the sci-fi section (an area of the store which I don’t tend to visit too often ). “Wow,” said I. “What a gorgeous, gorgeous volume this is”. And that utterance was followed by much stroking, hugging and inhaling (I drew the line at licking because I didn’t own the book ).

The Necronomicon really is a beauty to behold. Leather-bound and embossed in gold, it totally reeks of luxury – in an old gentleman’s library kind of way – which, I think is a very befitting treatment for what is a essentially a precious collection of stories. There’s a lot of additional content too – maps, background info etc. making it all the more desirable. Thankfully the price is right on this one too, so it won’t be long until The Necronomicon takes pride of place on my bookshelves (and then nothing will be able to stop me licking it ).

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Focus by Arthur Miller – If you’ve been following my reading journal lately then you would know that I’ve been up to my neck in the short stories of Arthur Miller (courtesy of Bloomsbury’s most excellent Presence: Collected Stories. Well what a timely reminder then, when I was reading this weekend’s Guardian Review supplement and up pops a mention of Arthur Miller’s only novel, Focus, in a ‘Top 10′ of novels featuring spectacles.

It had actually slipped my mind that Miller had written this novel, and the columnist who wrote up the brief synopsis for it really sells it for me (and I’m sure for others too):

Set in the 1940s, Miller’s novel features nondescript New York middle manager Newman, whose life changes radically when he gets a new pair of glasses. Suddenly he starts being mistaken for a Jew. Previously he was indifferent to the racism, but suddenly a world of bigotry is revealed to him.

Now, I know that Miller had a Jewish background, and that he often touched on this theme in his short stories (I Don’t Need You Any More and Mont Sant’ Angelo spring to mind), but I’m really interested to see what he can do with it in a full-length novel (I’m sure he also probably covered the subject Judaism and antisemitism in his plays but I never really follow them).

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William Trevor: The Collected Stories Giftset – So there I am sitting all smug, thinking that I have all of William Trevor’s short stories at my fingertips, bundled in the Penguin’s 1992 William Trevor: The Collected Stories, when I have a chat with Kim aka kimbofo over at her Reading Matters blog, and discover that I’m way off the mark on that one.

Kim was showcasing one of her favourite Christmas presents – Penguin’s newly published 2-volume HB edition of William Trevor: The Collected Stories. I already knew of their existence – I’ve drooled over them uncontrollably for long enough i.e. since Penguin publicist Joe Pickering first Twitter-pimped them (damn you Joe! *shakes fist*) – but I’d resisted the urge to buy them (mainly due to that old enemy called finances) and I’d resigned myself to sticking with the older and unwieldy single-volume paperback tome. But then Kim informed me that the four short story collections that Trevor has published since 1992 – After Rain, The Hill Bachelors, A Bit on the Side and Cheating at Canasta – are also included in the edition. I sat there agape, mainly because I should have known that a writer as prolific as Trevor isn’t going to go eighteen years without publishing further short story collections. Some William Trevor Fan eh? I’m embarrassed at my lack of knowledge.

Anyway, the upshot is there are an extra forty-eight Trevor shorts which I don’t have on my shelves. So you can bet that this new 2-volume HB edition is now well and truly affixed to my wishlist. I’m just biding my time now, until the price, and the finances, are right for buying. On the positive side though, at least I’ve now got a proper excuse for wanting to buy this Trevor set, other than aesthetics (oh and the practicality of the stories being split over the two volumes of course)