Lucy Lethbridge.

Lucy Lethbridge is literary adviser of
the London Tablet.

It's not often that you come across a book that you know you will keep close by you always, a friend and guide for life. Alban McCoy's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Catholicism (Continuum, $24.95, 136 pp.) is, for me, just that. The title (and slim size) suggests that this is a brisk, consolidating run through familiar themes. But you couldn't get a more intelligent guide than the Reverend McCoy (Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University), and his book is

full of surprises. At every turn he challenges complacency and makes ancient wisdom fresh, exciting--and reassuring, too.

Divided into four parts, "Common Questions," "The Ten Commandments," "The Seven Deadly Sins," and "The Virtuous Life," McCoy's essay is clear but not didactic--and although he tackles difficult theological subjects (never talking down) one feels immeasurably expanded by what he has to say. Take, for example, the seven deadly sins and the theological virtues: He examines each in turn (pride, sloth, envy, and avarice he calls the "cold-hearted respectable sins," and gluttony and lust, the "warm-hearted disreputable" ones) and shakes them up, makes them vivid, modern, and (to use a term I suspect he would dislike) "relevant." Sloth, for example, often masquerades as workaholicism--spiritual inactivity hiding behind feverish rushing about; gluttony is a virtue distorted; pride is "the sin of the solipsist." And then he takes faith and hope, and quotes Augustine--"love and do what you will"--because behind everything else in this wise book, the theme is "human flourishing."

Biographies generally sit reproachfully on my bookshelf. I'm afraid I am a dipper, flicking through the pictures, checking the index for scandalous bits, looking to see what happens at the end. This year, however, I immensely enjoyed two lives and read them through. The first, by Edward Fox, has the virtue of being an elegantly written but very slender ninety-five pages, one of a series of bite-size lives launched this year by Short Books. Fox tells the fascinating story of Alexander Csoma de Koros (1784-1842): The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven (Short Books, $8.95).

Csoma, born a peasant in a Transylvanian village, made it his life's work to trace the mysterious origins of the Hungarian people to Central Asia and Tibet. Csoma is quite simply an extraordinary figure. In his thirties, he walked from Hungary to the Himalayas, mastering seventeen languages on the way and disciplining mind and body to the limit, living off little more than boiled rice and tea, and walking everywhere when he wasn't poring over texts from the vast library of Tibetan literature. Isolated, single-minded, and frugal to the point of self-indulgence, Csoma was sustained only by a voracious desire to add to the store of his knowledge. He never made it to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden capital, but getting there wasn't the point. As Fox demonstrates, Csoma's "heaven," his destination, was always a metaphorical rather than a real place.

The other life I enjoyed is longer and also about a traveler, though of a different style. Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist by Deborah Manley and Peta Ree (Libri, $24.95, 304 pp.), is the story of the British consul general in Cairo in the early nineteenth century. This is the best kind of biography--the authors feel an intense sympathy for their subject and his times.

Trained as a painter, Salt was an indolent youth and seems to have fallen into his adventures by accident: invited to voyage with Lord Valentia to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) he became a friend of a bloodthirsty warlord, the Ras of Tigre. He fetched up in Cairo under the rule of Pasha Mehmet Ali who had chased the Mamlukes from the city they had ruled for five centuries. It was a remarkable time to be in Egypt, when ancient splendors lay buried under centuries of sand and many of the antiquities Salt collected now form the basis of the British Museum collection. Salt is modest, self-deprecating, and courageous--unjustly outshone by the more colorful characters who swept across the horizon of his time.

Housekeeping is an unfashionable activity, so I felt a pang of contemporary guilt at enjoying quite so much Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts (Scribner, $35, 884 pp.)--an exhaustive volume of excellent tips on the kinds of domestic skills lost to my generation, such as darning or pickling fruit. I don't suppose I will ever get down to either darning or pickling, but it is comforting to know that Mendelson is at hand should I want to. It is true that Home Comforts smacks of neurosis: I generally take the English view (this book is extremely rude about English standards of hygiene so I am on the defensive here) that a few germs are good for building up healthy immunity, but Mendelson's dirt-zapping energy is awesome. She even tackles the furniture of the mind, dispensing advice on what kind of books a household might fruitfully give space to. On these matters, I would rather put my trust in Father McCoy, but with The Intelligent Person's Guide to Catholicism at one end of the bookshelf and Home Comforts at the other I feel set up for life.

Finally, I'd like to put in a mention for a book which has already proved invaluable. If, like me, you are someone who rarely goes to the opera, hugely enjoys it when you get there, but feels a sneaking suspicion that you don't quite get what it's all about, then Robert Thicknesse's Opera Notes (HarperCollins, $13.95, 192 pp.) is the perfect guide. Thicknesse, the Times (of London) opera critic, has produced a slim volume containing a brisk run-through of 190 operas, including a plot summary, a neat paragraph on music and words, and some interesting background facts too. Just the thing to pep up flagging conversation in the interval. And I no longer have to fidget around in the gloom, angling the program into a beam of light to find out what's going on. It hasn't exactly changed my life but it has certainly enhanced it.