The blogosphere has been a-buzz with chatter about Howard’s End is on the Landing. This is Susan Hill’s year of reading from home, taking in no new books except those which she is to review for papers; that’s part of her job so is understandably exempt from the project. I first heard about the book from the always-reliable Dovegrey Reader, and I thought it sounded very much up my particular alley, so I immediately pre-ordered a copy. And they say that blogging doesn’t sell books! Tsch.

It’s a fairly short book – 230ish pages – and Susan Hill’s conversational writing makes the pages turn quickly. We follow her as she goes back to books she has loved at various points in her life, from childhood to recent years, as well as musing on books that she has owned for years but never read – Don Quixote, for instance:

I think I know a lot about Don Quixote. I do know a lot about Don Quixote. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancho Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds have I for believing it? Other people’s opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, Don Quixote has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it and, besides, I should miss its red leather binding. (p. 68)

I have a copy of Don Quixote too. I bought it from Oxfam Books on Byres Road in Glasgow in 2005, not long before I moved to Oxford. I haven’t read it. I do intend to, one day, but now I feel less guilty about not having picked it up thus far. I know where it is, though, it’s in one of two boxes of books in the attic that I don’t have room for on my shelves.

Susan Hill’s books aren’t in any order on her shelves. For the most part, neither are mine. My classics are, though, in alphabetical order in one bookcase, in our bedroom. I did this because during my MA I needed to refer to various Victorian novels (obviously) and so I put them all together to stop me having to run up and down stairs all the time. Pure laziness on my part, really. Also together, on a unit in what we call ‘the middle room’, downstairs, are the majority of Boyfriend’s books. Most are music-related, and generally Beatles-related. There is some natural history, some popular science, the ‘atheist books’ (Dawkins, Hitchins, et al), and a prodigious collection of Peanuts comic books. They are largely shelved together because they arrived together, when Boyfriend moved in with me a couple of years ago. They are gradually migrating around the house, though, happily intermingling with mine. Dawkins’s latest is sitting next to a book about Victorian sensation fiction on the other bedroom bookcase: a comforting symbol of our intermingled lives.

I particularly liked the section in the book about reading slowly. She refers to a nameless book blogger who reads twenty or so books a week (I have no idea who she’s referring to, by the way) and laments that reading has turned into ‘a form of speed dating’ for some. I am a middling-speed reader. I’ve never read 100 books in a year, which many bloggers seems to manage with ease. I would say my average is somewhere between 60-70 – slightly over one book per week. It’ll be much less than that this year, thanks to the Masters. There is something wonderful about savouring a book, and sometimes a book just demands that it is read slowly and carefully. Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, for instance. I would have lost so much if I’d just devoured it in one. But that said, sometimes a book just flies by without effort, and that is equally as valuable.

My only real disagreement with Hill came when she said that books were dead things on the shelf until they are picked up and read. I see what she’s saying, but for me they are a comfort to have around me. They really do furnish a room. They are also full of possibilities, and memories, and – as Catherine said in an email conversation we had about this – they are like friends dotted around the house.

Howard’s End is on the Landing made me think about the books I’ve read and the books I haven’t. Her chapter on Iris Murdoch reminds me that I have one of her novels on a shelf in the back bedroom – The Severed Head – that I’ve never picked up. It also made me want to read authors I’ve never considered before, like Elizabeth Bowen. But the thing I thought about most is her list of forty ‘desert island’ books. She readily admits that this list could change on any given day, and I’m sure mine would too. Would I take the Bible? I’m not in the slightest bit religious, but as Susan points out, it’s full of brilliant stories. I’d definitely take some Shakespeare, but could I possibly choose only one play? Perhaps she will let me take the Complete Works when she reads that my copy is co-edited by her husband. It goes without saying that Jane Eyre, Mrs Dalloway, and Bleak House would be in my backpack, but what else? Taking my cue from her chapter on diaries, perhaps I would take The Assassin’s Cloak, an anthology of entries by a huge range of famous diarists, from Pepys to Kenneth Williams. Is there such a thing as a complete works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman? I’d definitely take that, if it exists. If not, The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings will suffice.

I loved reading Susan Hill’s book because I love looking at other people’s bookshelves. It’s partly nosiness and partly book envy. I know if I were ever to see the inside of DGR’s fabled book room, I would be both enthralled and utterly jealous. From the sounds of it, I would feel exactly the same in Susan Hill’s house.