One of the great joys of slowing donw has been reading novels!  In the last fortnight or so I have read two and half stories. 

One of them I had been slogging through since early in the year; it demanded a lot of determination to wade through and to be honest did not really repay the effort, save to say that I'd read it.  Interesting then, that this week a book has been identified as being pseudonymously penned by the same author, and deemed excellent within its genre.

Another of them was what my mother used to term a 'penny dreadful' - an easy read, women's magazine style story set mostly in a twee version of highland Scotland and ending happily.  An easy read, ideal for a long train journey and utterly undemanding.

The third was one recommended to me by another minister as a good read: Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Musuem, combined ease of reading with an interesting approach and a reasonable plot.  I enjoyed reading it, and in the closing pages found a couple of quotes worth pondering...

'"The past is what you leave behind in life, ..." "Nonsense ... The past's what you take with you."'

'...words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.'

Kate Atkinson, behind the Scenes at the Museum, pub. Black Swan, 1995, Kindle edition

The second quotation struck me, I guess, because it states much of what theories of semantics and semiotics refer too, and which the Post Modern philosophers get all excited about as words are 'slippery' and their meaning is determined (only) in context.  Words construct a world that makes sense - true - but arguably they do so best, or potentially only, in a specific context.

More interesting is the first one, which seems to me to recognise an important truth about the ways we may relate to our past, indivudally or collectively.  Is it what we leave behind, completed, finished, done with, or is it what we carry with us, shaping and informing our future?  My MPhil research was predicated on the second perspective, but maybe needs a bit of unpacking/unpicking?  Is our past a 'burden' or a 'shackle' that holds us back and prevents us from becoming who we are meant to be?  Or is it a 'gift' or a 'resource' from which we can draw insights and understandings that will help us become the people we are meant to be?  Or is it siumltaneously both?  Or is it neither, being simply neutral. Nothing I haven't already spent loads of energy exploring, but quite interesting to see, clothed in fiction, explorations that were not a million miles from my own ideas.

I have no idea what the title of the novel has to do with the story, save that it cleverly uses a series of artefacts as prompts for excurses to tell tales from the 'past'.  I did half expect it to end up with a set of seemingly random artefacts in a single display case and that the book was the underlying story, but no.  The link is, it seems, the facades of houeses from past times which form part of the York Castle Museum... so, a story of what may have lain behind the scenes inone such house.  An enjoyable read, and a bit of food for thought too.