Linda Grant – I Murdered My Library

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Book Collections, Book Review, Books about Books, ereaders, I Murdered My Library, Linda Grant, Reading about Reading

A witty, thoughtful exploration into books, Kindles and downsizing a collection

This essay by Linda Grant is unfortunately ONLY available to those with ereaders, meaning the blissfully Kindle resistant will be deprived of its wisdom, pathos and humour.

Perhaps it is Grant’s vicious little revenge on those who have not moved home into a smaller place, and thus been forced, as she has, to perform an act of cruel culling on her lifetime collection of books.

I found MUCH to nod sagely at, and much to underline, on my KINDLE. However, nothing beats the pleasure of annotating and underlining on a REAL book, as Grant herself alludes. Yes, I know, some readers faint in horror at the idea of marking books in this way, but I have always regarded reading as a dialogue between writer and reader, a relationship between reader and what they read. Hence, riffling through my ancient, dusty, texts, some, like Grant’s dating back to childhood, it is the imprint of my physical presence at the time(s) I engaged with the tomes, that matters. Not just the writer’s words, which are the same, Kindle or book, and I may indeed have underlined and crossly or ecstatically commented on, in that furiously annoying neutrality of peck peck typing in the e reader format – but, the colour of the pen or pencil hastily picked up, the particular energy of my underlining or commenting, the handwriting itself – which has changed, and continues to change, over time, the smears of what was clearly a chocolate, or some tomato coloured sauce, across a page, the curious bus ticket hastily used as book mark – but to a place I swear I have never, ever been to – all this sings of relationship

To those who are muttering ‘vandal, brute’ at evidence of such cavalier ill-treatment of my own books, I would riposte and say that such greedy, energetic handling shows evidence of extreme love. I CHEERED at Grant’s assertion about her library of books, inhabiting and overflowing in the house she is downsizing from

The glory of the library for me is how many of the books are in poor physical condition. They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn.I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken

Grant details the agony of parting with her history – sure, SOME but not all of the older books will be available on Kindle, for re-read, and she will buy these when re-reads call, but, as she says, the physical books mark the passage of her years, a history of who she was, and hold intense memory in a way that does not happen with ereaders. To stand in front of one’s own bookshelves, if you are a life-long and voracious reader, is to see, as Grant confesses :

What I saw, swelling with self-important pride, was evidence of how I had constructed my own intellectual history through reading

Grant contrasts the swings between the airy freedom produced by the library held on a Kindle, with the feelings of devastation caused by the casting aside of some dusty tomes, and the keeping of others, in order that she will be able to fit into and live inside, her new, much smaller space

Melk Benedictine Abbey Library, Austria, Wiki Commons

Now at least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the worst things I have ever done.

The Kindle though, offers a freedom to enlarge the fonts of books which she can no longer read with tiny text – books that therefore remind the reader of ageing, of death, of loss. What once could be read, now can only be perused with magnifying glasses

But she also talks, with some spite and acerbic observation of the great tendency of style and design over substance – selling her house, the estate agent winces at the overflowing bookshelves, which are evidence of mess, and clutter.

Estate agents do not think that books furnish a room – books make rooms look messy….They completely destroy the impact of the accent wall. Books are too personal as objects to be displayed

I too, cannot help it, but to visit a book free home makes me uneasy. It is the very messiness of books, like the messiness of real, physical life, unsanitised, which books represent, which lures me. A bookshelf offers an intimacy into who someone is, and out on display, this is an intimacy a visitor is allowed to look at

For Grant, her real, physical library gives access to something deep:

I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.

I’m astonished, and not a little embarrassed that what Grant produced in a mere 28 pages in this essay should have led to me writing so many words (believe me, I could have written many more!)

In defence – I will say that this little essay of hers packs a world and a time into those 28 pages. Not surprising really, as readers of Grant’s novels know, she is a writer who chooses her words well, and writes ‘about stuff’ even when she is being ‘entertaining’. She uncovered more in her 28 pages than many denser tomes about books, reading, writing and the history of all this might have done.

I Murdered My Library Amazon UK
I Murdered My Library Amazon USA

Susan Hill – Howards End Is On The Landing

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Book Review, Books about Books, Howards End Is On The Landing, Reading about Reading, Susan Hill

The pleasure of curling up with a good book about the pleasures of curling up with a good book

Susan Hill’s book about her books and the profound nature of the reading experience is unalloyed JOY. The premise is simple, she searches for a book from her shelves which she can’t find, gets lured by the contents of those shelves, and decides to explore her bookshelves more deeply; this sparks her to write a book about the experience.

This is much, much more than one of those dreary ‘list’ books – books you should read before you die, top classics etc etc. She spins off into a relationship with reading itself, and also some of her favourite books take her into accounts of writers she has met.

She did attract some reviews which commented negatively that the book is just ‘name dropping’ It doesn’t come across like that to THIS reader. Hill is a writer who had her first book published aged 18. She’s been fortunate to have mingled with literary life, and, personally, accounts of her brief meetings with, for example, such a wide range of ‘different greats’ as Edith Sitwell, Ian Fleming and even Benjamin Britten are utterly fascinating.

She’s an eclectic, unsnobby quirky reader – and I guess that’s why I find her appealing – someone who is as at home with Ian Fleming as they are with the book of Common Prayer, Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll and Trollope (Anthony) as well as Victorian diarists but NOT Jane Austen is an interesting mind.

Though I don’t share her discomfort with Jane I found her Austen immunity interesting.

There are also chapters extolling favourite reading places, the physical experience of reading, the pleasure of fonts, dustjackets and bindings, and, constantly poking through, a sense of books as mysterious, totemic objects with perhaps a secret life of their own…….she muses about which books might be happy or unhappy to be sitting next to its booky neighbour. Magic realism!

A charm (literally!) and an utter delight.

And maybe the subtitle  ‘A Year Of Reading From Home’, just MIGHT be a piece of useful advice for myself (and compatriot bookiephiles) as i gaze in horror on the huge and mounting wobbly piles of unread books (often added to following squints to see what others are reading) which exist on chairs, bookcases and of course, almost invisibly and therefore more dangerously, on the Kindle. With the unread Kindles at 86, and the piles on the chairs (never mind elsewhere) at 40 plus I reckon that if I DID manage Hill’s  ‘only read what you have at home’ that could comfortably see me through the year, and if it didn’t, well the pleasure of re-reads would be there. Will I do this? Unlikely, dear reader, unlikely. Maybe if no bookie bloggers read or blog about their reading, if Amazon reviews all vanish, if I wear a sign saying DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT BOOKS around my neck, if I never pick up a newspaper or magazine which has book reviews, hear or watch any programme about writing, writers etc. I probably need casting away on a desert island with only the unread books, no internet access, and helicopter drops of food parcels. Ah well. I’ll happily re-read Hill again!

Howards End Is On The Landing Amazon UK
Howards End Is On The Landing Amazon USA