Stocking fillers

Since there's still at least one, possibly two, shopping days left until Christmas, and given that some people seem not to have all their presents bought and wrapped, here's a suggestion:

The Very Short Introduction series of paperbacks produced by the Oxford University Press have that irreproachable OUP cachet, of course, which is an assurance that even though you're getting a pre-digested bolus of information with the bones all filleted out, it's certain to be good stuff, nutritious and wholesome, if not exactly tasty.

It's been a long time since anyone could be expected to know everything -- Robert Hooke or Thomas Young was the last, depending on who you believe -- but that's no excuse for knowing nothing. Also, I'm a big fan of Trollope, which means I need something else to carry with me for reading on the bus or in the Post Office queue, so slim volumes are dear to me and me lumbago.

The list, as you'll see from the link, is extensive, and I suppose you could measure the state of your intellectual curiosity by the ones you'd leave lying, assuming you're not already an expert in all those areas. I've so far bombed through Islam, The French Revolution and The Elements: one subject I do know something about, bracketed by two I don't. That's the Before.

And the After? As you might expect, I know a great deal more about Islam and the elements than I did before, and with authors of the calibre of Malise Ruthven and Philip Ball I have no reason to think I've been fed rubbish. I don't feel myself inspired by either, though, sadly. Maybe there just isn't time in the space of 160 pages to awaken an enduring interest in a subject. Maybe it's just me, though I do feel I went into it open to being turned on, if you will.

The problem becomes clearer with the French Revolution as subject. I'd put that on a par with the Periodic Table for scope, breadth, panorama, influence. You can't fit it all in. Sure, name-checks go to all the great figures: Roberspierre, Danton, Marat, as well as Burke, Carlyle and Dickens. You would never be able to tell, from this showing, why one was bigger than anyone else, or in what way.

So these are less books in the conventional sense, more like primers. Consider these the executive summary to the full report. The author of the volume on the French Revolution twice makes a snide remark about Simon Schama's Citizens -- Simon Bolivar only gets one mention -- and you can forgive him his pique. Schama had all that space (948 pp) to fill and wasted it. William Doyle gets 135 including index. He does a good job, and he does leave you wanting more. But what a nightmare the edit must have been.

Coming up next: The Koran, Intelligence (two more things I know nothing about) and The Renaissance (some knowledge, mostly forgotten). If I've anything to observe, I'll call back.

One point to make about the series as a whole: OUP need desperately to put in place some special point-of-sale display where these books can be stacked as a series, as Penguin did most recently with its Penguin 70s. From what I've seen (two Brussels English bookshops, both doing it) there's a tendency to put individual volumes in the section they seem to belong in. This is a mistake: this is the sort of book you'd happily pick up out of curiosity and buy never having had the slightest intention to buy a book on, say, Habermas. If you need to be in the right section already to find it, the chances are a VSI is not what you're looking for. All those curiosity sales will vanish, and nobody will ever find out who Habermas was, or is, or what. I could easily see me finishing up with an extensive selection of these books, but only if I can find them first.

VSIs have a £6.99 price ticket in the UK, $9.95 in the US. Not a lot for what you get. I of course pay more. Don't ask me why.