Reading From Home

I'm getting serious about this idea now. Susan Hill put it into my head with her book, 'Howard's End is on the Landing.' I mentioned the idea three or four weeks ago on here... and people are threatening to take me at my word... but what if I actually went ahead? What if I tried my very level best not to buy any books for a year?

I've tried to test out the feeling a little in the past month. I've bought very few novels for once. Okay, there was the Book Club choice for January's meeting - the new Tom Perrotta, but that can't count. Book Club is intractable. Also, there was joining Audible, and promising to buy a book a month from there - but that shouldn't count either, since mp3 files take up NO SPACE AT ALL. And space is the issue here, in the no-buying-books stakes. These past few days I've even boxed up books to go into the attic. We're being that radical round here. Oh, I bought 'The Edwardians' in a charity shop, too, didn't I? But that was a single secondhand book. One secondhand book in almost a month! That's unheard of!

The thing that's persuading me most to go ahead with No More New Books is to do with this reorganising of shelves and sorting through heaps of stuff. It's a process that has unearthed masses of things I want to read right now. Books catch my eye and I buy them and bring them home and it's like they drift down to the bottom of the river. I catch at one or two and read them... but so many are sent drifting soundlessly to the silty bed of the stream. Sediment settles over them. They're on the shelf but you stop noticing them. But... they're there the whole time: waiting for you. Waiting to come flashing up to the surface. I really think books find you at the right moment.

Just now - hoiking things off the bottom shelf of my bookcase by my desk - it's double-rowed and packed solid. So packed solid, this particular to-be-read bookcase - that it's hard to squeeze individual books free. But - just now - hoiking ten up at random... I get things I realise I can't wait to be reading. Adam Ant's Autobiography. Barbara Erskine's 'The Warrior's Princess' - another bonkers reincarnation spectacular from Barbara, lying neglected there! A 1974 story anthology edited by beloved Mary Danby, 'The Frighteners.' John Wyndham's collection, 'The Seeds of Time.' John Dickson Carr's 'The Waxworks Murders' (You read the first chapter and loved it, didn't you? But then you put it down when you raced out for the train that day and somehow forgot to go back to it. Fickle, fickle!) Ursula le Guin's 'Wizard of Earthsea.' (You must have read that once surely? But when? Where? You need to read it again!) Jackie Collins' 'The World is Full of Divorced Women.' (Remember how pleased you were to find there was a sequel to her 'World is Full of Married Men'?) John Rowe Townsend 'Goodbye to Gumble's Yard' (It's set here in Manchester! How did you miss it?) 'The Cricket in Times Square' by George Seldon, unknown to you.. Ed McBain's 'The Mugger' (Time to go back to 87th Precinct!)

And these are just ten. Lying about. Waiting for you. Amongst hundreds of paperbacks in the house.