I often hold small committee meetings in my living room; eight is the maximum attendance. That’s not because it is a particularly small room, but because it is lined on all sides with bookcases (excepting the doors and window), so the useful dimensions are significantly reduced.
It’s probably a good job I don’t have a rambling farmhouse like Susan Hill’s or like her, I’d have stuffed it full of books. Yet she’s come up, in Howard’s End is on the Landing, a good idea as a result of that cornucopia – she set herself the task over a year of, if not rereading them all, then certainly revisiting them.
The result is a meandering, pleasant read – a wander through possibilities, for, she says “A book which is left on the shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.
I found it delightful and evocative, despite the fact that – the honorable exception of Dorothy L. Sayers and the other women writers of the Great Age of the English detective novel aside (and a small diversion into Elizabethan plays) – there’s very little cross-over between our libraries.
Like Hill, however, there are plenty of books that I don’t keep – and she’s delightfully practical on the subject. She writes:
Many have gone – lent or left, sold or given away, for there is nothing essentially sacred about a book just because it is printed on paper and bound between covers... You don’t read many thrillers twice. Others served a temporary practical need – your cat was having kittens and you needed to know how to look after them; you were travelling to Denmark and wanted a guide.... Pass the thriller to a friend, give the cat book to the charity shop, sell the guide to Denmark on eBay. You don’’t have to pay its ren t just because it is a book.
But there’s a lot more to Howard’s End is on the Landing than books: it’s also a story of decades of London literary life. I can only envy Hill’s early introduction to the London Library (a delight I’ve only relatively recently enjoyed – and with my own cash) and her enjoyment of its celebrities (something I miss out on since I’m usually dashing in and out).
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