Bookish Enthusiasm

If you are a reader then you probably like to chat about books. Unfortunately, many of us don’t have that many people in our day-to-day lives who are happy to indulge our bookish enthusiasm. Thankfully, when we have bored those around us to tears with our single-minded concentration on books we can always turn to a book about books to satisfy our need for bookish conversation. I read two books about books in the last few weeks and am here to talk to you about them.

One of the real joys of books about books (I feel that I will be typing that phrase frequently in this post. My apologies. Apparently, there is no term for books about books though I feel there should be. Suggestions are welcome.) is that the author shares the reader’s unbridled enthusiasm for books. It feels as if you are having a enthralling conversation with another book lover. That is exactly how I felt when I was reading Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzinbrink. In her book Rentzinbrink talks about the books that have helped her through her life and how she used books to come to terms with a tragedy in her family.

I will be my own doctor and prescribe the best medicine: a course of rereading. I will make piles of my most treasured books and read through them, taking comfort not only in each book itself but also in the reassuring knowledge that there are many more to come. Something shifts in my body. I feel better already, just at the thought of turning off my phone and spending my evenings curled up with a good book. This is what I have always done. When the bite of real life is too brutal, I retreat into made-up worlds and tread well-worn paths. I don’t crave the new when I feel like this, but look for solace in the familiar. It is as though in re-encountering my most-loved ficitonal characters, I can also reconnect with my previous selves and come out feeling less fragmented. Reading built me and always has the power to put me back together again.

I love the last sentence of that quote. Readers are built by the books we have read. Rentzinbrink and I have obviously not been built by exactly the same books but reading her writing and coming across a book we have in common makes me feel as if I am sitting down and chatting to a friend about the books we love. I also like this quote at the very end of the book.

Above all, I find it consoling to be reminded that I am not alone, that everything I feel has been felt before, that everything I struggle with has been perplexing others since the dawn of time. My favorite books are universal. They illuminate my own life as well as showing me the lives of others and leave me changed, my worldview expanded. When I turn the last page I rejoin the real world knowing I am only a tiny speck in it, one small piece in a gigantic jigsaw. My concerns may feel modern and specific to me, but really they are as old as time itself. How do I love people when I know that the pain of their death might kill me? How do I live well in an unfair world? How do I care about my fellow humans but not end up choked by my own empathy? How do I balance my desire for excitement with my need for solitude?

I finished Dear Reader and immediately turned to Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. She says “It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read. ” The landing led to the various rooms in the house all filled with books and each room had books she had never read, wanted to read again, or had forgotten she owned. Hill decided to start on a year-long voyage through her books to see what was on her shelves. She reminisces about authors and publishers she has known, libraries she has visited, and all kinds of books. Here is what she says about what she calls non-books.

Small hardbacked books bought in the run-up to Christmas or Valentine’s or Mother’s Day are non-books. They are about Everything Being Rubbish or how to microwave a budgerigar or where to go before you die, or why Slough is the armpit of the universe; they are little anthologies of love poems or things read at funerals or cartoons about politicians. Non-books breed, too. Books about Everything Being Rubbish breed others the same or, contrariwise, books about Everything Being Wonderful; old-fashioned recipes from Grandma’s kitchen breed Grandpa’s allotment tips. No one is expected to sit down and read a non-book from cover to cover but they come in handy for Boxing Day, when people lie idly in front of the fire flipping through them and laughing maddeningly and reading bits out to the assembly who read out bits from their own non-books in turn.

Is there a family alive who has not given each other non-books and then insisted on “laughing maddeningly and reading bits out”?

Hill and I do not agree about all books. She is not a fan of Jane Austen which is heresy in my book and she is a fan of Virginia Woolf whom I can take or leave but we do have a shared appreciation of Elizabeth Bowen.

If you want to know what London was like during and in the aftermath of the Blitz, a bombed-out terrain of half-houses hanging almost in mid-air, of blacked-out streets, of rubble and waste ground across which valerian and ragged robin grew, read Bowen. If you want to know how people talked and walked and tried to go about their everyday lives and above all how there was a strange hollow at the heart of things, read Bowen.

The broad canvas is not for her. She expresses, describes, highlights by a perfect use of detail–a lace doily with a few crumbs left on a plate, a pair of chamois-leather gloves being buttoned at the wrist, a man striking a match in the street to light the cigarette of a stranger, furniture, food, drink, items of clothing. She knows that detail can either be pointless, tiresome padding which contracts the reader’s own imagination, or that it can be made to count, in the way it can somehow echo a sentence, illuminate a moment of choice, stand for a very particular emotional situation.

Those paragraphs made me want to immediately pull the Bowen novels I have been saving off my shelves.

I know this post is mainly made up of quotes but, believe it or not, I have exercised restraint. Both of these books are bristling with post-it notes marking passages I particularly liked. I’ll end with one more quote from Susan Hill.

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me? Alice in Wonderland. The Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howards End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

I love the idea of literary DNA. We are the books we read. And, while no one else is exactly like us, there is a joy in encountering someone else who loves books, specific ones or books in general, as much as we do. And thus we have the appeal of books about books.