March: What I Read

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (4*) - FINALLY, I HAVE CONQUERED THE BEAST.  Yes, fifteen years after my teenage self combed through this book for 'good bits' and nearly lost her lunch, my adult self read it in its entirety and to her surprise, rather enjoyed herself!  This book is not going to be for everyone, or even for most people.  The eponymous Patrick Bateman's relentlessly monotonous cycle of brand names, outfit descriptions, expensive restaurants, pill-popping and bed-hopping will put many off before they even GET to the torture, murder, sadism and frenzied cannibalism - but actually, I ended up finding the repetitive detail quite soothing, and found that not only did this shallow everyday rhythm counter the (incredibly) graphic scenes beautifully, but it also allowed Bateman's black humour and moments of sudden wisdom and humanity to shine through with unexpected brightness.  I got quite fond of him by the end - like somehow as reader and character we had been through the wringer together, each inside the other's psyche - and I still can't quite work out how much of his narrative was 'real' or whether some interactions and moments were purely the product of his increasingly desperate mind.  Now I'm going to allow myself to revisit the (much tamer and more obviously funny) movie, and my mastery of this novel will finally be complete!

Little House in the Big Woods (Little House 1) by Laura Ingalls Wilder (4.5*) - I'm waaaay behind on Bex's 2016 Little House readalong, so this month I finally picked up the first book to get started - and it was wonderful.  Set in the early 1870s in Wisconsin, it's an autobiographical year in the life of four year-old Laura's pioneer family - Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura and baby Carrie - and their log cabin in the woods.  What really struck me was how connected the family is to its surroundings: how the shifting seasons are enjoyed; how the natural world is respected and seen as something to coexist with, not conquer; and how each meal, each foodstuff, each item for the house is carefully planned and created from scratch, often with help from Laura's wider family.  It's a wonderful antidote to modern living, with charming illustrations to add to the reading experience, and I loved every minute.  It's a rose-tinted tale to be sure, and it lost half a star for a couple of slightly muddled descriptions of the objects and processes Laura observed - but they were minor gripes.  Roll on book 2!

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (4*) - I'm not a massive reader of historical fiction, but when the film buzz first arose (with a bunch of my favourite actors attached to the project) it really whet my appetite for this one.  It's the story of a young Irish girl, Eilis, who travels from Enniscorthy to Brooklyn in the 1950s to start a new life full of expanded opportunities and interesting people.  The novel explores her growth from a timid girl to a poised young woman, and the way she is torn between her Irish roots and American lifestyle.  It's written in a slightly detached tone, and the ending was a bit too abrupt for me (albeit realistic), but I loved Eilis's journey and the many little details that brought her experiences to life, whether it was the rough crossing to New York, working in a department store, Christmas at the local parish hall, or spending the day at the beach with friends.  A compelling, subtle little novel that didn't rock my world, but made me very glad I picked it up and gave it a chance.  Just one word of warning - don't (re)watch the movie trailer if you plan to read it; it spoils (and therefore ruins) one of the most important plot points of the whole novel!

P.S. I watched the movie last night and it was BEAUTIFUL.  The music is to die for, it streamlines some of the fussier strands of the original, and the slight air of detachment in the novel gives way to a deeply emotional screen adaptation that ends on a perfect note.  My only issues with it were that some of the key characters lacked the depth and spark they had on the page, and it skipped over most of the novel's romantic scenes that served to heighten the stakes in Eilis's dual lives and make the necessity to choose between them all the more poignant.


Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (4*) - Yup, I finally read it - which is good, because I was starting to feel like the last person in the universe to pick it up, and it's been on my shelves for TWO AND A HALF YEARS already.  I didn't like it as much as Attachments, but I appreciated the slow-building and refreshingly joyful nature of the relationship between Cath and Levi, and I loved Reagan's sass and Mr Avery's dry wit (I was imagining him as Stanley Tucci all the way through!).  The focus on the Simon Snow fandom brought back some great Potter memories, and given my Carry On purchase last week it's probably a good thing that I preferred Cath's fanfiction to the 'real' Simon book excerpts peppered through the novel.  Overall I think it was maybe a little longer than it needed to be, but it finally succeeded where Anna and the French Kiss (and others) failed for me - it's a fun, bookish college novel full of interesting and multifaceted characters and different types of relationships and issues, and has a self-awareness and charm that help to excuse its more clichéd moments.  Bring on the next Rainbow! 


It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini (5*) - This book's been on my radar for the longest time (you know how much I love a good mental health novel) and HOORAY, it was so worth the wait!  First of all, let me say that it's quite refreshing to read one of these stories from the perspective of an average guy; not a painfully innocent or shy boy, or a kooky girl, but a regular, testosterone-driven, vaguely worldly fifteen year-old who likes video games, pot and jerking off.  Craig's description of his five days in a mental hospital, which he checks himself into after a long battle with depression and a night of suicidal crisis - is not only pithy, warm and very realistic (it is drawn from Vizzini's own experiences), it is also, as the title suggest, really kind of funny.  It's filled with wonderful characters and it's possibly the most relatable mental health novel I've read yet; I've scrawled so many notes and hearts and stars in the margin to mark passages to go back to next time I need to feel that I'm not alone and that other people have had the same weird thoughts as I'm having.  I also watched the movie adaptation, which is quite faithful to the book and put a big smile on my face by the time the credits rolled.  Highly recommended!

Gold by Dan Rhodes (4*) - This is an odd little book.  Nothing much happens, and yet it completely won my heart back in 2009 with its mixture of small-town characters, gentle charm and earthy British flavour.  It opens with three friends - short Mr Hughes, tall Mr Hughes and Mr Puw - chatting idly in their local pub.  Septic Barry is sitting across the room with his band, and Mr Edwards is pulling pints behind the bar.  All is as it should be.  And then a Japanese-looking girl walks in, orders a pint and sits down in the corner.  "Welcome back," everyone says.  But who is she?  Every year she arrives in this little Welsh coastal town and stays for a fortnight, alone, walking and drinking and reading.  Why is she here?  The book meanders through each day of her stay, adding little by little to the quirky tapestry of the town and the people in it as their stories unfold, and reaching deeper into Miyuki's life back home.  It's funny and delightful and strangely beautiful, and I loved reconnecting with it - and its sweetheart of a protagonist - all over again!

Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction by Tom Raabe (4.5*) - Another reread for me - and one I would wholeheartedly recommend to a large swathe of my fellow book lovers, be they LibraryThingers, GoodReaders, bloggers, BookTubers or just die-hard lifelong readers.  It could have been written for us - or by us, for that matter!  In short, this is a comprehensive guide to biblioholism and all the various quirky traits and habits that go along with it.  It is evident that Raabe is 'one of us' and he drives right to the heart of our affliction with humour and insight.  Alongside chapters on book buying, reading, collecting and storage, he also includes a hilarious alternative history of the book and a section on the extremes of bookish behaviour - eating books, stealing them, burying them and even destroying them.  With a wealth of interesting and amusing examples of biblioholic behaviour drawn from literature and history, this is a definite keeper for me - and I was delighted to find that when it came to the self-help-esque quiz (just how bad DO you have it?) I had actually increased my score a few points since my last reading; I can now rest assured that I'm still on my chosen path to eventually dying happily under a collapsed bookcase.  Good to know.  :)

 

 

Aaaaand that was my March...  Hope you all enjoyed your reading this month too!

REVIEW: Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - The Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co, by Jeremy Mercer (5*)

Alternative title - Time was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Co.
by Jeremy Mercer (Phoenix, 2006)

"Two months before I'd had a high-profile job with an enviable salary, a sleek black German sedan on lease, an apartment in a fashionable downtown neighbourhood, and a collection of not-so-inexpensive shirts and jackets hanging in the closet.  Now, there were a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no job or prospect thereof, some clothes jammed into an old handbag, and a bed in a tattered bookstore to call home.  All things considered, I couldn't have been happier."

As most of my regular readers will know (because I've mentioned it so many times!), this book and I have been good friends for many years now.  I bought it from the bookshop on my university campus and this month has marked my third reading.  The first time I read it, I fell in love.  The second time, I looked for inspiration.  The third time, I found both.  This is, I suppose, the story of our friendship!

My first reading...

I was still at university (I think) and fell utterly in love with Mercer's world of bohemians and books.  My review on LibraryThing went like this:

"On the run from an unfortunate mistake in his Canadian life as a crime journalist, Jeremy Mercer heads to Paris to escape for a while.  Caught in a rainstorm near Notre-Dame one afternoon, he spots a welcoming light across the river and thus stumbles inadvertently on the Shakespeare and Company bookshop.  Invited upstairs for tea by the beautiful woman behind the desk, wandering the labyrinth of books and beds, he soon realises that this is no ordinary bookshop and, as a poor writer, is invited to join the ranks of lost souls inhabiting the book-lined rooms.

So begins his whimsical and quintessentially bohemian stay, under the watchful eye of eccentric owner George Whitman (surely the star of the book, with his fascinating life and Communist ideals), who renamed his unique store after the original literary oasis, run by his good friend Sylvia Beach, which was forced to close down during the Second World War.  Here all are welcome to browse and lose themselves in their reading; tea is offered on a Sunday; eclectic readings take place in the library; literary and political opinions are argued out – and those in need of a bed will find one amongst the books in return for a few hours helping around the shop and in the kitchen.

Mercer deliciously evokes days trawling the scattered tomes, nights spent storytelling by the Seine, tourists attracted by the store’s reputation, wanderers attracted by Whitman’s generosity, showering in the public washhouses, scrounging leftover food to get by: in short, a poor life, without good facilities or scope for wastage of any kind, but a happy, lively life nonetheless.  The characters moving through Whitman’s utopia are many and varied, yet he remains, a kind of rock in the tides of time and tourism, as the chaos of youthful dreams and books and wine whirls around him. 

Of course, eventually reality bites for Mercer and it’s time to move on – but his journey is magical and the lessons of the bookstore honest.  Now I have Sylvia Beach’s own book 'Shakespeare and Company’ to read, and I recommend the documentary ‘Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man’, made towards the end of Mercer’s time in Paris and readily available online.  Still not sure whether to read it?  Try searching online for photos of the store in all its glory – if that doesn’t persuade you, nothing will!"


My second reading...

The second time I read the book, two years later, I was on the cusp of opening my bookshop.  Since then I'd seen the documentary I mentioned at least twice - it became one of my go-to methods for getting out of a reading slump or inspiring me to read more each day - and seen lots of pictures and amateur YouTube footage of the shop, and I felt like I was going into the book with a more rounded feel for the world George Whitman had created for himself, his writers and the daily flood of visitors.

This time around, I wasn't just looking for a bookish good read - I was also looking for bookshop inspiration.  Thanks to George and to Mercer's book, I understood that books are, ironically, only a small part of running a bookshop.  While we wouldn't have the space and the right kind of customers to create anything like George's vision, I tried to adapt some of the elements of the atmosphere I'd fallen in love with through Mercer's account into workable parts of our own shop.  We tried to pour ourselves into our surroundings and make our shop a friendly and idiosyncratic place to be.

We didn't have a mirror covered in letters and cards - but we had a humble pinboard with pictures, interesting things we found tucked in books, recommendations and bestseller lists.  We didn't have a shop cat - but we did have a tiny mouse that liked to sit in our bird feeder, much to the bemusement of the tourists.  We didn't have beds amongst the bookshelves - but we had comfortable chairs where regulars would sit chatting about books and their lives (or sleeping, in one case).  Because it was OUR shop, and we had the flexibility of mostly selling second-hand books, I wasn't afraid to sometimes make personal decisions instead of business ones, waiving a few pennies for a kid whose pocket money wouldn't quite stretch to a book they wanted, slipping in a freebie for a teenager who was eagerly collecting Star Trek novels, or helping out a practically-homeless woman who would 'buy' a book for a fraction of the marked price on the understanding that she'd bring it back when she was finished with it.  In the back of my mind, there was always the question, "What would George do?"  I still hadn't visited Shakespeare and Company, thanks in part to the agoraphobia that crippled me right at the time when a Paris trip would have been ideal - after uni, before work - but it was always in my mind, thanks to Jeremy Mercer and his magical book.


My third reading...

And so we come to 2014.  After four and a half years of trading as a mother-daughter business, in a bookshop that had become our second home, we sold up and moved on around the New Year.  Neither of us have been back to see what it looks like now - it would be like going back to your old house to see what the new owners have done with it - and it already feels like a distant memory, thanks in part to the crippling depression that's driven such a huge wedge between me and the rest of the world of late.

As far as rereading this book goes, it means I've finally read it as a whole, in a lot of ways.  The first time, I was reading it as a magical vision of bookish possibility; the second time, I was reading it and feeling inspired in my own business; the third time, I've been able to just read it for itself, feeling greater familiarity with the world Mercer was immersed in and a greater appreciation for the negative aspects of life at the bookshop - the thieves, the poverty - as well as the amazing ones.  I can also now place the timeline of the book compared to the documentary, which was made after Mercer left the shop but while he was still in Paris, the summer that George's teenage daughter Sylvia returned from England to live with him for a few months; some of Mercer's friends at the bookstore appear in the film, and so does he, briefly!  I can now appreciate how close George and Jeremy became over the years, and the role he played in bringing Sylvia back to Paris.  At the time he stayed in the store, George could only dream that one day Sylvia might come home and carry on the family business in his place, so it warmed my heart to know that his dream came true.  Without her permanent return to the shop, where she quickly took over as manageress, the bookshop might have been lost when George died just before Christmas 2011.  I only wish that I'd made it to Paris while he was alive... 

If you'd like to watch the documentary that I've been going on about with such reverence, it's not available as a whole on Google video any more, but it keeps cropping up around the internet, sometimes in sections, sometimes in its entirety.  It's just under an hour long in total, and gives you such a flavour of life at Shakespeare and Company in the early Noughties, its history, its eccentric late owner, and the 'tumbleweeds', the ever-changing collection of young writers who continue to live and work there to this day.  I love it, and (when it's available!) I watch it every so often when I'm in a reading slump or feel generally uninspired.  I hope you enjoy it too!

Notable Quotables:

• "I woke up straight.  The instant my eyes opened, everything felt sharp and clear, as if I'd finished a wind sprint or stepped from a frothing sea.  I'd always been one to play with snooze buttons, lolling in bed and rationalising being ten, twenty, thirty minutes late for work or school.  But that first morning at the bookstore, there were no slow degrees of consciousness or seductive fingers of sleep.  I was alive."
• "In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés.  Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights.  That night at Polly's, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple.  That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too.  Hope is a beautiful drug."
• "He washed his clothes by hand, ate the most basic of meals, and shunned the cinemas or restaurants.  With this regime, not only was he able to survive on the bookstore's paltry receipts but he also managed to provide communal meals and tuck away enough money to keep expanding the bookstore... George had discovered money to be the greatest slave master, and by reducing your dependence on it, he believed, you could loosen the grip of a suffocating world."
• "I had been at the bookstore more than a month, but it felt like time had barely passed.  Without the normal barometer of a workday or a fixed schedule, life had become fluid.  It was hard to keep track of the hours and days in the bookstore, everything came and went in pleasurable waves of evenings and mornings and afternoons.  In the criminal world there is a term, hard time, which refers to difficult prison sentences in maximum-security facilities... Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I'd ever felt."
• ""You know, that's what I've always wanted this place to be," he said.  "I look across at Notre Dame and I sometimes think the bookstore is an annexe of the church.  A place for the people who don't quite fit in over there."  I understood.  We sipped our beer until the sun set and then sat awhile longer."
• "Living with George at Shakespeare and Company has changed me, made me wonder about the life I left and the life I want to live.  For now, I sit, I type, I try to be a better man.  Life is a work in progress."

Source: I bought this book from the little branch of Blackwell's, above Market Square, at the University of York.

REVIEW: Ex Libris - Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman (4.5*)

(Penguin Books, 2000)

"... there is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child."

This lovely little volume is a collection of essays about books and reading.  Fadiman does not deal in generalisations and the broad sweep of the literary world, instead writing about her deeply personal habits and experiences.  Whether she is discussing the difficulties of merging libraries with her husband, or the delights of reading a book in its real-life setting, her introspective approach means that the reader doesn't feel the need to argue or dispute her opinions; instead we are simply invited to enjoy the ride and reflect on our own reading experiences along the way. 

Like many American 'books about books' (and Fadiman does love her old-school highbrow literature), there were many titles I hadn't heard of and many authors I wasn't familiar with, but rather unusually, in this case I found that my enjoyment wasn't dented at all.  Fadiman's lightly-worn expertise means that her readers don't need an intimate knowledge of every volume she cites, and her infectious enthusiasm had me adding a whole bunch of new and exciting titles to my wishlist rather than getting frustrated.  She also includes a list of more 'books about books' at the end, some of which I already own, and some of which I'm sure I'll be seeking out at some point!

Obviously I would highly recommend this one to book lovers who haven't already succumbed to its pleasures - but rather than leave the post at that, I thought instead I'd give you a run-down of the essays themselves.  I don't know about everyone else, but sometimes with a book like this I like to know a bit more about what I'm buying so that I can better judge whether it's going to contain pieces I'm interested in, written from a perspective I'm going to appreciate...

1.  Marrying Libraries
One of my favourite essays of the bunch - though like songs on a CD, I do sometimes wonder if this is because it's at the beginning and so I've probably read it most often!  It is about a reader's love for their own books, about an individual's unique history with each volume on their shelves, and the perils of trying to sort and categorise books when you are melding collections with another, equally idiosyncratic reader.

• "Promising to love each other for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health... had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn't say anything about marrying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates.  That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt."

2.  The Joy of Sesquipedalians
Fadiman shares her family's love of words, and the pleasure they get from learning new, long or archaic words to add to their already impressive vocabularies (this is one of the few books I've read over the years where I've had to consult a dictionary every few pages!).  Some of the more ancient examples she cites are quite beautiful, and her enthusiasm is infectious!

3.  My Odd Shelf
A quirky essay about what Fadiman calls her 'odd shelf' - a collection of around sixty books on polar exploration.  She practically bubbles with enthusiasm, sharing little-known facts and explaining why she loves these tales so much.  This is the kind of essay she writes best, I think: sharing her affection for her favourite books and making us want to rush off and read them too!

• "When the corpses of some of Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield.  These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen."

4.  Scorn Not the Sonnet
Fadiman looks back at her youthful fascination with the sonnet form, and neatly captures the earnest but usually fairly painful compulsion of a bookish teenager to write bad poetry.  It is also the moving story of her father's developing blindness, and the poetry and intellectual curiosity that saved him from despair.

• "It was a grievous blow when Miss Farrar tacked up the class's star sonnets on the bulletin board and mine was not among them.  Her favorite was about the Acropolis... its author called the Parthenon "a ruined crown".  It never occurred to me that this metaphor alone was worth a hundred of my entire sonnet."
• "My sonnets looked like poems.  They quacked like poems.  But at seventeen, when I got to college and my critical faculties suddenly kicked in, I had to admit that they weren't really poems.  I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles."

5.  Never Do That to a Book

An exploration of the way readers interact with their books, and the different attitudes we have towards the book as an object.  Do we keep our books pristine and care for them faithfully, or do we annotate, dog-ear, stick mementoes between the pages, and generally make them our own?  Is the book a vessel or a sacred object, and what makes this particular topic so inflammatory for bookish folks?  This is another of my favourites, because it's so very relatable!

•  "The chambermaid believed in courtly love.  A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.  The Fadiman family believed in carnal love." 

6.  True Woman
Musings on an old book on the subject of a woman's duties, passed down to Anne from her great-grandmother Maude.  The archaic advice laid down in the book is set against Maude's life and against Anne's role as a modern wife and mother.  It's quite interesting, but very personal and not so bookish; it would probably have been a better fit in Fadiman's other book of essays, At Large and At Small.

7.  Words on a Flyleaf
A rather lovely essay about inscriptions, beginning with where they are written and how they are acquired.  Fadiman includes some famous examples (eg. Shelley to Keats, Byron to the Marchesa Guiccioli) as well as some personal ones, showing how special a book becomes when it contains a carefully-considered inscription from a lover or friend.  Another one I like to reread fairly regularly!

8.  You Are There
What is it like to read a book in the very place being described within its pages?  For Fadiman this is a kind of literary double whammy - being able to look around and see, smell and experience some little piece of that book in the flesh.  The less the place has changed, the better!  My favourite part of the essay is when Fadiman's little daughter gets to enjoy this phenomenon at a certain famous New York hotel - it's so adorable!

• "When he read Livy at Thrasymenus - in Latin, of course - Macauley achieved a kind of Double Word Score whose peculiar frisson will be instantly recognized by anyone who has ever read Wordsworth at Grasmere, Gibbon in Rome, or Thoreau at Walden."

9.  The His'er Problem
One of the duller essays of the collection, about gender bias in language, and the pros and cons of trying to find more neutral alternatives.  Fadiman successfully walks the fine line between historical precedent and modern feminism and it's worth reading, but honestly?  I'm not THAT interested in etymology, and I prefer it when she's talking about books.

10.  Insert a Carrot
The actual title of this essay has proofreading symbols in it, which I can't figure out how to do on here, so... go with it.  This one's about spelling and grammar mistakes, and the sheer impossibility of switching off your inner proofreader if you have a pedantic nature.  I'm sure many of us can identify!  Fadiman comes from a family of compulsive correctors and includes some brilliant examples of classic proofreading blunders, which always make me laugh!

11.  Eternal Ink

Fadiman goes right back to the basics of the writing experience: the implements we use.  Part of the essay is a kind of love letter to her favourite pen and the romance of writing with a quill, before she moves on to modern convenience and how writing on a computer differs to the reassuring permanence of ink.  I really enjoyed this one for its simultaneously relatable ideas and its very personal touch.

• "What a pleasure it is to open one's mailbox and find a letter from an old friend whose handwriting on the envelope is as instantly recognizable as a face!"

12.  The Literary Glutton
One of my absolute favourite essays, covering every aspect of literary gluttony, from the literal (people who chew book pages) to the sublime decadence of food description.  Interestingly, she returns to her polar exploration shelf to show how vivid and joyful a hungry man's description of an imagined meal can be.  This is a real celebration of the sensuousness and poetry of food writing, and made me immediately think of everything from The Darling Buds of May to Enid Blyton picnics, Chocolat to the groaning tables in the Great Hall at Hogwarts.  Gorgeous.

• "My most frequent response to gastronomic references in literature is an immediate urge to raid the refrigerator.  When I happen to be reading in bed, the spoils are a source of marital strife.  If I had married Charles Lamb, who once told Coleridge that he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins, I would have no problem, but instead I married George, to whom crumbs on the pillows - especially after we have brushed our teeth - are a sign of grave moral turpitude."

13.  Nothing New Under the Sun
A playful but enlightening look at plagiarism in an era in which nothing is truly 'new' - who does it, how attitudes to plagiarism have changed, and how it affects its victims.  Fadiman cites some extreme (and deeply ironic) examples, which made me smile!  In a rather inspired move, this essay is also excessively footnoted, showing every single source of influence and input, from the title (taken from Ecclesiastes) to phone conversations Fadiman made to her mother.  It's amusing but also makes her point very cleverly!

14.  The Catalogical Imperative
Fadiman explains her peculiar addiction to mail order catalogues: she delights in the ridiculous yet tempting items on offer, and the vastly hyperbolic descriptions that are always so very entertaining to read!  She describes the wondrous plenty of an old Sears catalogue, and explores the way these companies pander to our fantasy lifestyle via her imaginary alter-ego, 'Anne Sadiman'.  Pithy and amusing!

• "... why do I receive catalogues devoted exclusively to salsa, equestrian gear, electric grills, extra-large clothes, extra-small clothes, tours to sites at which UFOs have landed, and resin reproductions of medieval gargoyles?  Do these companies know something about me that I don't know?"

15.  My Ancestral Castles
A rather magical essay about the way in which a parent's reading habits trickle down to their children: how a child observes someone reading, imitates them, and might later borrow books from their library, opening up a new world of discovery.  Fadiman talks about our fond memories of the books that we had around the house in childhood - and how many of us had our first encounters with literary 'dirty bits' via sneaky peeks at some of the less virtuous titles on those very same bookshelves!

• "My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure.  When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parents' rooms are empty...  By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says PRIVATE - GROWNUPS KEEP OUT: a child sprawled on the bed, reading."

16.  Sharing the Mayhem
Fadiman explores the joys of reading aloud, and of hearing a story read aloud to you in turn.  She discusses Dickens's famously dramatic public reading of Nancy's death scene from Oliver Twist, the act of reading aloud to your children, and the romantic intimacy of lovers reading to one another.

• "When you read silently, only the writer performs.  When you read aloud, the performance is collaborative.  One partner provides the words, the other the rhythm.  No stage is required, no rehearsal, not even an audience.  When he was a boy, Heine read Don Quixote to the trees and flowers in the Palace Garden of Düsseldorf.  Lamb believed that it was criminal to read Shakespeare and Milton silently, even if no one was there to listen."

17.  The P.M.'s Empire of Books
An essay about William Gladstone and his obsession with arranging, cataloguing and housing his books.  He saw this occupation as a retreat from his government work, and made it his mission to cram as many books as possible into a small space: he designed an optimum library layout, and invented the rolling bookshelves now used at the Bodleian Library (amongst other places).  He even wrote a book about it!  Definitely one of the more unusual and fascinating pieces of the bunch.

18.  Secondhand Prose
I'd actually forgotten all about this essay in between reads, so it was a pleasant surprise to get to the end of the collection and find an entire piece about the delights of second-hand books!  Obviously I'm biased, but I loved this one.  Fadiman writes eloquently about her affection for second-hand bookshops: the surprises, the romance, the temptation...  In the name of balance, she also cites George Orwell's experiences as proof that running one of these bookshops isn't always idyllic (yup), and describes the flipside of used books - all those unwanted titles sitting unloved, without a home.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the idea that once a library is split apart in a secondhand bookshop, it no longer 'is' its owner - the books lose their context and meaning.  With my own books, I definitely find that once they're divided up onto the bookshop shelves, they no longer feel like a part of me and it's easier to let them go.  If they're together in the office in a stack, on the other hand, they still feel like a part of 'my collection'.  Books get their value from the way they sit within a library or a personal collection - a book with no home and no context loses that value.

• "On an earlier birthday, George gave me a two-volume set of Farthest North, Fridtjof Nansen's account of his unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole by ship.  The edges were unopened.  As I slit them with an unpracticed fingernail, I was overcome with melancholy.  These beautiful volumes had been published in 1897, and not a single person had read them.  I had the urge to lend them to as many friends as possible in order to make up for all the caresses they had missed during their first century."
• "In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher's warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership.  If I don't buy the book now, I may never have another chance.  And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak."

Source:  I acquired this book six years ago after finding it frequently quoted in The Book Addict’s Treasury (Julie Rugg and Lynda Murphy), and it's been a much-loved fixture on my shelves ever since!

REVIEW: So Many Books, So Little Time - A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson (4*)

(Berkley, 2004)

Sara Nelson sets out with noble intentions. A devout reader during both her working and personal life, she decides to set herself the goal of reading a book a week for a year, writing a journal of her bookish habits, reading choices and general reflections as she goes.  From idle moments and snatched pages to family vacations and whole insomnia-ridden nights, this book is the resulting chronicle of her project.

This is definitely a book lover's book - which may explain why I found this second reading so much more enjoyable than the first, a few years ago.  I have more bookish knowledge and hundreds more books' worth of reading experience behind me these days, so I appreciated more of Nelson's choices and reading reactions this time around.  I've heard of more of the books, read some of the same titles, and am more immersed in the literary world online, and thus I found I had significantly more to relate to. 

In a way, reading Nelson's book is a little like being part of a book blog, a book club or an online reading community - it's made all the more enjoyable by the fact that in the back of your mind there's a quiet chant of "One of us, one of us" making you feel like a part of the action.  I recognised many of the author's bookish habits as my own – the myriad ways of choosing books, the building of book piles and compiling of lists, and the art of reading ‘just one more chapter’ at night until your eyes start to close of their own accord - and I recognised too the reluctance to loan out books, the way book hype can be more offputting than appealing, and the discomfort that stems from a friend enthusiastically lending you an 'amazing' book that you really don't want to read.

Obviously, as will always happen when two readers clash, there are areas on which Nelson liked to dwell that didn't interest me.  That is an inescapable part of interacting with other book lovers, whether you are in a book club or reading a blog.  There were certain books that I would never pick up, and certain themes that related to her life that wouldn't relate to mine.  Sometimes she might read an autobiography that was evidently written by an American personality I'd never heard of, and I'd move on fairly quickly to the next chapter.  Roll on the British version, I say, to iron out some of these differences!

At the end of the day, this is one of those books that basically does what it says on the tin.  It is an amble through a year of reading, with detours into Nelson's life as it relates to the books she is reading.  Why does she choose one book over another when she is fighting with her husband?  Why does this particular title make her feel a certain way, and how do her mood and her circumstances affect what she chooses to read - or to put down - in any given week?  These are questions we all ask ourselves every time we stop to consider why we choose the books we do, and why we react to books in such different ways, and Nelson reflects them back at us with a tongue-in-cheek nod to our shared bookish whims and peculiarities.  One to dip into, to savour - and be sure to read it with a pen and paper standing by to note down all the books you fancy reading for yourself!

Notable quotables:

• "Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and a book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin.  A friend of mine says that when he meets a book he loves, he starts to shake involuntarily.  For me, the feeling comes in a rush: I'm reading along and suddenly a word or phrase or scene enlarges before my eyes and soon everything around me is just so much different fuzzy background." (p33)
• "That's the good news about a good first line: Like the romantic insanity of the first weeks of a love affair, it can ground you, and keep you from bolting later on when things calm down.  But there's a risk in opening big, too: A powerful beginning raises a reader's hopes.  Should the rest of the book not measure up - and let's face it, so few do - I feel ripped off.  Hell hath no fury like an expectant reader scorned." (p209)
• "I've lived the past year exactly how I've wanted to - between the covers of books and in the places in my head that those books have taken me.  I've been agitated, excited, enthralled, annoyed, frustrated, and sometimes a little bored.  But I've never been lonely." (p229-230)

Source: I received this book as a gift from my mum a few years ago.

REVIEW: How Reading Changed My Life, by Anna Quindlen (4*)

(The Library of Contemporary Thought, 1998)

When I picked this book up, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Was it going to be a serious discourse on certain key books, like Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built? Perhaps a few bookish essays in the vein of Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, or a sentimental autobiography about hardship and bookish redemption? Actually, it is none of those things.

Instead, what Quindlen offers us is an extended essay on books and reading, split into sections and garnished with bookish quotes from the likes of Thoreau and Whitman. In delicious prose that exudes enthusiasm, Quindlen meanders skilfully across a range of topics including the feeling of a being a book-lover in the midst of others who just don't 'get it', book snobbishness, academic elitism, book clubs, libraries, how men and women read differently, banned books and coming-of-age reading. Perhaps the most telling part is that on the future of the book and the rise of modern technology. This book was published in 1998, and Quindlen seems to find the idea of e-readers and online reading a bit of a curiosity, comparing it to the old fantasy films in which we were all eating capsule meals by the year 2000. I guess it just goes to show how quickly technology is leaping forward these days...

Though the final result bears little resemblance to what I'd expected from the rather self-centred title, this was even better than I'd hoped - a marvellous, well-reasoned look at the world of books, with enough of an 'every woman' feel to the anecdotes and examples to make it more inclusive and therefore more enjoyable to read. There is also a section at the back of the book with 'top ten' reading lists like '10 Books That Will Help a Teenager Feel More Human' and '10 Mystery Novels I'd Most Like to Find in a Summer Rental', which is a nice touch and added a few more titles to my wishlist... Highly recommended!

Source: I bought this book from a seller on Amazon Marketplace.