"Howards End is on the Landing" is on the Landing

Just recently I've given up on reading a couple of things that were dragging along. I don't feel guilty about that anymore. One of them was 500 pages and I was about 50 from the finish and I thought - well, I know how this is going to end. Another I was halfway through and it was so bleak and boringly, self-consciously horrific - though nicely-written - I just put it on the pile by the front door for going back to the library.

And got on with other stuff instead. Rereading 'The Secret Garden' for my workshop and seminar this week on the MA course. This time just about everyone loved discovering or rediscovering the book - after mixed results with the Eve Garnett and the Edith Nesbit. We talked about life-affirming books and the importance of novels in which there are no out-and-out villains. Novels which resist the temptation to demonise and see things very simply.

So, that was a pleasure to reread. I've just picked up Susan Hill's memoir of a year spent rereading, "Howards End is on the Landing" (which actually is on our top landing table - see illus.) I love reading about people's reading habits, and that's one of the reasons I enjoy bookish blogs. This book's like one extended one, in many ways - with Susan Hill roving through the stacks of books in her house. I love the way the shelves and cases themselves get mapped out for us. I kind of want a Tolkienesque map in the endpapers, showing just where that row of Observer books lies, or those Penguin reprints...

Something very engaging about the idea of not buying new books and going all greenish with the ones you've already got, clogging up the house. As I've said before, our house is rammed full. They're tottering everywhere and all out of order. And the cellar's chocka, too.

At the station yesterday - held up going home - I was making up rules for days spent book-shopping. Rules which might include making sure you take with you a couple of carrierbags of books you've finished with, to pop into a charity shop as your first port of call. Only then are you allowed to buy anything new. That might work. I mean, look at that to-read pile in the corner of my tiny study. (The pic with the hedgehog lamp).

When I was in Ilkley for the festival, I met up with Stuart after my workshop and before my reading, and he'd driven all the way down from Edinburgh. We were starving but the first thing we did was find ourselves an amazing remainder bookshop, where everything was 3 for 5 pounds. (One day I'll write a piece about the joys of remainder bookshops. I don't care what anyone says - I love them.) He was under express orders from his wife not to go home with more new books. But before we knew it we were both sitting with a pile of purchases in a tea rooms ordering bacon barms and mugs of tea. Completely helpless and hopeless.

Maybe Susan Hill will help me concentrate my various collections down. Winnow out some of the chaff. Maybe. While she picks through and finds the all-time favourites she's returned to repeatedly, she also spends some time writing about the pleasures of owning books you haven't read yet. The spanking new novels that sit there enticingly - patient for your attention. (Look at Murakami's "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" - a full eight years it sat waiting for me. Its paperback went through two new covers and a change of publisher before I took it down and took it on holiday.) So I'm also being talked into not parting with anything at all. One day that thing that's sat there will find its moment in your life... perhaps.

J's always on at me to get rid of some. Then I filled three deep cardboard boxes and put them in the downstairs hall. Waiting for him to drive them to a charity shop... but then I find him digging through the boxes, fetching things back out... 'Hey, there's a signed Terry Pratchett in here!' etc.

Anyway... so I'm enjoying Susan Hill's book, and the new sequel to Winnie the Pooh by David Benedictus which came in the same Amazon haul... and I'm completely loving rereading "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society". Soonest reread of all time, this one. I read it in the summer - and now it's Book Club choice for next month. It's my suggestion and I'm relishing the chance to revisit the world of those characters. This time, as well as Helene Hanff, it's reminding me of "Diary of a Provincial Lady", "Mrs Minniver" and Stella Gibbons in "Cold Comfort Farm", but that's okay - I like those echoes. The tone's not too arch, it's not too deliberately heart-warming, it's not too precious or worthy. It lets us make up our minds and draw out the implications from the overlapping letters. It's just a nicely put together novel and I like it. A keeper.

But then, most of them are.