Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home [Paperback]

I read a review of this book and it captured my imagination. Susan Hill had been looking for her copy of Howard's End and as she struggled to locate it she realised that amongst the books on the landing there were at least a dozen that she had never read; this made her re-evaluate how she read and she decided to spend a year reading only books that were on her shelves. Like Susan I purchase many books each year, both new and second-hand, and I also borrow books from the library. I am growing increasingly aware that I am very unlikely to read all of the books that I own in my lifetime, and I was very attracted by the notion of finding out how someone else had attempted to tackle this problem.

Hill decided that she would forsake new purchases and just concentrate on her own personal library. The process of selecting the books that she would read is the main thrust of the narrative. She considers different genres of fiction and also different types of non-fiction including diaries and journals. She focuses on particular authors such as Dickens and Hardy and outlines what they meant to her. She also gives us anecdotes of her meetings with famous writers that she has personally encountered. I found the consideration of individual writers to be slightly disappointing; there weren't the insights into these writers that I was hoping for. She is nowhere near as insightful as Orwell can be or for that matter, John Cowper Powys, whose books `One Hundred Best Books' and the `Enjoyment of Literature' I find to be almost inexhaustible.

I enjoyed the atmosphere that Susan created. You get a sense of what her house in the countryside is like and there was a sense of adventure about the whole literary journey. I found the book to also be thought-provoking and I have decided that I will also avoid new purchases next year (or at least try to) and just focus on the many unread books that I own. She has certainly encouraged me to re-examine how I go about reading and how I can structure it, and that can only be a good thing. She has also brought to my attention several books that I am unfamiliar with such as `The Rector's Daughter' by F.M. Mayor. Although I was slightly disappointed with some aspects of the book, especially the rather commonplace observations about the merits or otherwise of some writers, it is a book worth reading, and any passionate reader will do well to consider how and why they read. The book is worth buying for many reasons, not the least being the fantastic paragraph which sets the scene at the end of the introductory chapter:

"The journey began in the old farmhouse where I live, surrounded by the gently rising hills and graceful trees, the ploughed and planted fields, the hedgerows and flower borders and orchards and old stone walls, the deer and birds and hedgehogs and rabbits, the foxes and badgers and moths and bees of Gloucestershire. I climbed two flights of elm-wood stairs to the top landing in search of a book, and found myself embarked on a year of travelling through the books of a lifetime."

I found myself rationing my reading of this book because I didn't want to reach the end. It is far more than a list of books Susan Hill read during the year when she decided not to buy any new ones. It is a memoir which includes fascinating insights into other authors she has met during her life in the literary sphere.

The author's love of books and reading shines out from every page and provides new authors to explore for anyone reading it. After reading Hill's thoughts on Dickens I may well give him another try as I don't think I've given his books a fair chance. There are excursions into lesser known 19th and 20th century authors as well as the classics. There are chapters on short stories and essays as well as novels and children's picture books and there is one on spiritual reading which I found truly inspiring. At the end there is a list of 40 books the author decided she could not live without - a sort of Desert Island Discs for books. But there are far more than these 40 mentioned and discussed in the text.

I did not agree with all the author's conclusions but I do agree that both Anthony Trollope and Anita Brookner are underrated as authors. The book is written in a subtle unobtrusive style which is something of a trade mark for Susan Hill. George Orwell wrote that a good writer's prose should be transparent so that the reader is unaware of reading it only aware of the message conveyed. In this book Hill achieves just that. I loved it and would recommend it to anyone who loves books and reading.

Susan Hill's latest is a memoir about reading the books in her house and the stories they are associated with. At the heart of HEIOTL, as I shall abbreviate it to, is Hill's decision not to add to her house full of books for a year (except for books she is to review); to explore her collection and find new books to read in it, to re-discover lost gems and re-read favourites, and then to compile a list of the forty books she couldn't live without.

Each shelf examined brings reminiscences. There are stories about encounters with great writers and celebrated personages, who all seemed to be very supportive of the young novelist, and indeed many of them became friends. I loved all this name-dropping, and particularly enjoyed the chapter about Benjamin Britten whose 'Sea Interludes' provided an epiphany for Hill (I love them too - they were marvellous to play many years ago in Croydon Youth Philharmonic Orchestra); the story about Alan Clark was good also.

There are many discussions of writers and their books. Hill is refreshingly honest about what she doesn't enjoy reading as well as her literary loves - she's no Austenite, but reveres much of Thomas Hardy, she can't be doing with Terry Pratchett and Sci-Fi in general but did concede to liking John Wyndham but puts him in the horror pile. I was delighted that she loves Ian Fleming, John Le Carré and Michael Connelly too.

Although I haven't read him, her chapter about W.G.Sebald does make me want to read The Rings of Saturn. She writes "But so many places on a Sebald journey are eerie, deserted, out of date, and lie under a pall of dismal weather. In The Rings of Saturn he walks through East Anglia and manages to make places I know well, and have found sparkling and lively, suicidally depressing." I lived and worked for nearly two years in and around Great Yarmouth - a South Londoner fresh out of uni and mostly have never felt so lonely as then.

Then at the last pages we get to the final forty, the snapshot in time of the forty books she couldn't do without - well on that day at least, for she says she would probably pick a different 40 tomorrow. The natural extension of this is to start compiling one's own forty - but that's a project for another day ...

Every year I say I must read more books from my TBR mountains. Do I think I could do as Hill did and not buy any new books for a whole year? It would be nice, but I don't think I can. My biggest problem post-HEIOTL is the number of books I've added to my wishlist, and may have to buy/acquire, after reading it - an index would have been slightly helpful here! I love reading books about books, and this one (with its lovely cover) didn't disappoint at all.