So here we are, eight days before the shortest day in the year and about ten days after the earliest sunset in the year. (For those of you whose intuition is that the shortest day of the year should be the day when the sunset is latest, let me point you to the least incomprehensible explanation I have found of the phenomenon known as analemma.)

(Of course, a small but select portion of my readership should substitute ‘longest’ and ‘latest’ for ‘shortest’ and ‘earliest’ in the above paragraph, but if you think I’m going to do that for you after what you did to us at the Gabba….)

However, despite what the calendar says, the weather feels much more like autumn, at least here in Maale Adumim. In fact, as I write on Sunday, it feels like an Indian summer. (Which I just googled, incidentally, to discover that it has nothing to do with the Raj, as I always thought, and we should probably be calling it a Native American summer.)

All of which has nothing to do with this week’s topic (so don’t stop reading, even if you’ve understood next to nothing so far). It was only the thought of leaves that enticed me to precede them with ‘Autumn’, so that you would never guess just what I plan to share with you, which is, in fact, some reflections on the books I happen to be reading (or, ‘leafing’ through – d’ya geddit?) at the moment.

In the past – and certainly until I retired – I would only ever read one book at a time. At that stage, almost all of my reading was fiction. Sometimes a complete working week would go by without me finding (or, perhaps I should say, making) time to read at all. I then discovered, if I attempted to read two novels simultaneously, that characters from one would start sneaking through to the other, until I reached the point where I was no longer sure who belonged where.

Once I retired, however, I started to stretch myself, and also began reading far more non-fiction than ever previously, to the point where I now feel confident in juggling up to four books simultaneously, rarely, if ever, fumbling any of them. This feat is undoubtedly made easier by the fact that two of the books are what I am reading aloud to Bernice, and all four books are from very different genres.

Having made a conscious decision a year or so ago to read more poetry, our (theoretically daily) reading sessions begin with a poem. Perhaps, on reflection, our current volume of poetry might more accurately be called verse. My brother and I grew up with a volume of light verse first published in 1933 and, in our edition, revised in the early 1950s. It was written by literary siblings Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon.

An aside: It’s incredible how much cultural background you need in order to understand immediately the social significance of such things as personal or street names in England. To give just one example. A British TV sitcom of the 1960s starred Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, who lived in Sebastopol Terrace, Acton, London. The Siege of Sebastopol (1854–5) was a major campaign in the Crimean War. Over the next 40 years, London grew 500% in area. This meant that, in every new district, large numbers of names had to be found for new streets. Crimean War victories were an obvious candidate for commemoration in this way. By 1960, the houses in these new districts were 80 or more years old. As a result, ‘Sebastopol Terrace’ was a recognizable shorthand for a rundown street of Victorian houses in a neglected area of London. Similarly, all three names ‘Herbert’, ‘Eleanor’ and ‘Farjeon’ together place the siblings firmly in the upper-middle classes of the first half of the 20^th Century.

The book of verse we grew up with was Kings and Queens, which offered, for each of the English (later British) monarchs from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II, a one-page poem summarizing the highlights of the reign. These poems captured, mostly wittily, the popular perception of each monarch. If provoked, Martin and I are still capable of boring people at parties with recitations of the half-remembered verses.

Martin saw, and bought me for my last birthday, a follow-up volume, Heroes and Heroines, which dissects in a similar fashion such diverse figures as Robin Hood, Napoleon, Pocohontas and Florence Nightingale. Currently, Bernice and I are reading a poem a day as an amuse bouche before we read a chapter of a novel. Like so many sequels, Heroes and Heroines does not always reach the heights of Kings and Queens, but it is nevertheless a very enjoyable read, and I have learnt what Lady Hester Stanhope – who was previously just a name to me – is famous for.

The novel we are currently three-quarters of the way through is Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, whose central characters are an illegal Chinese immigrant in New York and her son. The novel is written from the viewpoints of both the mother and the son, and it movingly and powerfully explores the very real emotional and material hardships that many immigrants face. It is clearly very thoroughly researched, but never feels didactic, and the author’s control over how and when the elements of the story are revealed is masterful.

However, the first 280 pages have been almost relentlessly bleak. Indeed, Bernice feared that there would no redemption. I, on the other hand, have been waiting in expectation of a happy ending, and, in the last 20 pages, we both feel that we can see a faint pink glow that suggests that the sun may eventually shine again.

We have both been reflecting on the fact that almost all the novels we have read lately (and much of the non-fiction) ranges between depressing and gut-wrenching. It seems to me that this is not just a question of the narrative. In many Dickens novels, almost all of the storyline is bleak; however, there is a relish in the storytelling that lifts the spirits. That celebration of the form sometimes seems to me to be missing in contemporary literature.

As a counterweight to this, I started reading Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language. I am a great fan of Bryson (who isn’t?), both in his explicitly comic (Notes from a Small Island) and his more ‘serious’ (The Human Body) modes. I must admit that I initially found Mother Tongue a little plodding, with somewhat of a shopping list of examples and observations. I wonder whether that is because I know considerably more about the English language than I do about the human body. (Mind you, I know considerably more about most things than I do about the human body, even my own.) However, I am now warming to it rather more. Bryson is certainly a master of the casual comic aside, and, at his best, breathes real life into dry facts and statistics.

My fourth current book – designated as shabbat reading – is Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l’s last book, Morality. Let me lay my cards on the table. If there exists, at this moment, a more important book, a more enlightening book, a book better able to make sense of what ails the Western world in these troubled times, and to offer hope for our future, then I am not aware of it.

What makes this book so special? There are, I believe, a number of elements. Rabbi Sacks was both an academic philosopher and a deeply religious man. This combination gave him both the perspective to recognize, and the tools and vocabulary to analyze and discuss, the moral challenges of our age. Plagued (or blessed) with insomnia, he read very widely and voraciously, enabling him to bring a wealth of wide-ranging and relevant classic and contemporary sources to the discussion. A man of great modesty and intellectual honesty, he was incapable of subordinating the facts to his position on any issue. Above all, perhaps, he possessed what just might be the greatest gift an intellectual can have. He could see clearly to the heart of an argument, and was able to explain and discuss profound ideas in language of absolute clarity and simplicity.

In Morality’s 23 chapters, each only 10 or 20 pages long, Rabbi Sacks revisited several themes that had long been at the centre of his understanding of Judaism and its contribution to the world – family and community as opposed to the individual, covenant as opposed to contract, guilt culture as opposed to shame culture, choice as opposed to fate. In Morality he fused these and other elements into a single, unified approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of the modern age.

If you are concerned by the path Western society seems to be taking, and if you are looking for one book to read to make sense of what is happening, and to suggest how current trends might be reversed, then I cannot too highly recommend Morality as that book. Its subtitle is ambitious – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times – but this only reflects Rabbi Sacks’ optimism and his overwhelming belief in man’s capacity for good. To read the book is to feel simultaneously saddened by all that the world has lost with his death and gladdened that he managed to leave us so rich a legacy of thought.

I pray that society will adopt his recommended approach, and thereby make the world an even better place for Tao to grow up in.

Meanwhile, Tao is channeling his energies into helping seal the cob floor of the tipee with linseed oil: repairing the world one coat at a time.