What I'm Reading This Week

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

--C.S. Lewis.
I'm more like one old one to thirty new ones. But I'm hoping it helps to read a really old one -- just over 800 years, as it happens. Now, I know that 800 years isn't really all that old when you think about books, many of which were written more than two or even three thousand years ago, but as a twenty-first century American, I think the early 1200s is enough of a gap to give me the benefits of reading the writing of a man who lived in a very, very different culture from my own.

And did he ever. Just imagine a book by a general in the Iraq War beginning with a modern equivalent of these words:

In the year of our Lord 1198, when Innocent was Pope in Rome, Philip was King of France and Richard King of England, there lived in France a man of saintly character called Foulques, who was in holy orders and priest of the parish of Neuilly, a small town lying between Paris and Lagny-sur-Marne. This same Foulques began to preach the Word of God throughout the Ile de France and in other surrounding provinces; and God worked many miracles for his sake.

It's the "man of saintly character" living in France that really shows you how different the world was in 1198!

Villehardouin's work is a first-person narrative of the disastrous Fourth Crusade that (if memory serves since I'm not through with the book yet) resulted in the sack of Constantinople, the greatest and wealthiest Christian city on the planet at the time -- by the Crusaders! Although this is history, the "plot" of this shaggy-dog story is better than most works of fiction I've ready, and it would make a terrific movie -- much better than the Crusade-tale "The Kingdom of Heaven" from a couple of years ago. Hollywood wouldn't even have to invent characters -- the screen would be lit up by the blind Doge of Venice leading his men ashore in Byzantium, Thibaut, appetite-inspiring knights like the Comte de Champagne et de Brie, Emperor Isaac of Constantinople, who was dethroned, blinded and imprisoned by his brother, but reinstated by the Crusader army, and Villehardouin himself, the Marshal of Champagne (and later Romania!).

Most striking is how readable Villehardouin is, despite the distance of eight centuries. In part because he was dictating, the book reads like a transcript of a television documentary interview with an old soldier.

And best of all, it's a Penguin Classic. There's just something about those black and yellow covers, the scholarly introduction and the pricing on the cover for the USA, the UK, New Zealand, and Canada. And often a tasteful note on the font (though all we get in this version is a description that the font is set in "Monotype Bembo" -- it's a little disappointing not to get the history of the font).

So read this book today! This book will change your life! Maybe Oprah will pick this book next!