STRAY LEAVES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXX, Issue 20153, 6 July 1935, Page 21

STRAY LEAVES

DOINGS IN WORLD OF BOOKS A committee consisting of the Bishop of Gloucester, the Bishop of Oxford, Sir Frederic Keyon, the Dean of Christchurch, the Rev. Dr A. Nairne, Dr Alexander Souter, Dr F. C. Birkitt, Dr B. H. Streeter, and the Rev. S. C. E. Legg, has been meeting to consider the possibility of an entirely new text of the New Testament in Greek, in which full use shall be made of the various readings and interpretations which have been produced by scholarship in recent years. The first result of their labours, “The Gospel of St. Mark,’ is being published by the Oxford Press at a guinea.

“It is a curious fact that ardent readers of detective novels differ most violently and profoundly in their opinions about them. When you have recommended one to a friend you are quite likely to find that he genuinely thinks it the worst he has ever read,” writes Margaret I. Cole, in the ‘Daily Herald.’ “Readers expect such different things. One demands that a detective novel should be as like a real novel as possible and contain real characters in whom we believe. Another doesn’t care if all the characters are colourless labels, so long as the action is sufficiently breathless and exciting. A third doesn’t mind about characters or excitement provided he can have a closely argued, almost ’ mathematical type of book, leading for choice to a highly bizarre or ingenious solution. And one man’s meat, in detective novels, is definitely another man’s poison—though, fortunately for us who write them, the appetite of the detective story fan is so large that he will generally gobble up the poison as rapidly as the meat.”

prances Woodhouse, of “Country Holiday” (Allen and Unwin), is of opinion that nobody has a burden they cannot bear; not that the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, but that the lamb is .tempered to the wind. Even the chopped earthworm “has no more than it can bear.” Her story of orphan sons, in which the younger gives his affection and devotion to his brother, reveals an unusual knowledge in a woman of the love between men. In this case the younger boy grieves for ten years for the death of his brother, who has been mate and parent combined. The survivor is a quaint ittle doctor of medicine with a sense of humour. He invents three aunts to supply his need of relations, and the aunts’ comments on all and sundry are the “comic relief” to what would otherwise be sad. He loses his one and inly love among women by shy gentleness, and she is carried off by his aggressive partner. The rural pictures are true to Nature, and. the friends of the two young men real and human. Of the hospital nurses and slum practice we cannot write so favourably, unless the whole group is exceptional medically. It is a first novel, and i? worthy of genuine praise for opening « new road of clean sentiment.