Things I have read recently.

I read an awful lot. I should read more - this is true for everyone, after all - and I try to read a wide range. I study literature full time (I am taking this degree) and it would be so easy just to stick to the Victorians. But that would be naughty, so I do try to read around a bit.

Over Christmas I read Graham Swift's Out of this World, which I thought was just wonderful. I, like every right thinking individual, love Waterland, so I was excited to see this one for sale for only one pound at Housmans bookshop! (A review of this store will follow in due course.) Out of this World grapples with the same themes as his most famous title, such as family traumas and the difficulties of representing histories, and I thought it was excellent. He's so insightful and painfully accurate.

I followed that with another family saga. The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen, was recommended to me by a friend. It has the line 'Mum loved Christmas the way other people love sex', the sort of pithy observation that litters the novel. It was pretty good. Certainly he's a wonderful writer: the plot was sewn together beautifully, and I was genuinely affected by some parts of the narrative. The final part of the story, which deals with Parkinson’s sufferer Albert’s rapid decline in health, and subsequent death, was excellently written. But I think the work as a whole was probably lost on me. The tone suggested some sort of crisis in contemporary American culture, and, not knowing a huge amount about America, I think some of Franzen’s observations went over my head. The power of the pharmaceuticals companies, for example, informs the backdrop to the main story, as concerned son Gary attempts to strike a deal with a nasty corporation who have screwed his dad over. It’s also a staggeringly long novel, at over 700 pages. Definitely one to look at again.

For my course, I’ve read a huge amount as usual. Lots of theory (Foucault and Freud, mostly) which I tend to dislike. Also some obscure Victorian fiction, which, though it does nothing at all on the page, is actually fascinating. We studied it alongside Darwin’s Origin of Species, and came to some interesting conclusions! Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is short but perfectly formed. A seriously amazing story. I saw a reader full of her stories for sale at the Calder Bookshop the other day, for three pounds – I wasn’t quite sure, so decided not to. I may treat myself tomorrow morning, perhaps, as I wander past on my way to the library.

Coming up over the next few weeks: George Gissing’s The Other Women, Collins’ The Woman in White, and Dracula. Looking forward!

So, this will be familiar to a few of you...

Because I'm a little lazy, this is a cut and paste job. But, oh! It's just so true and excellent - I love that feeling when somebody (far more eloquent) puts your thoughts into words. So, this Walter Benjamin, on collecting books:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing davlight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

[...]

ActualIy, inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection. For a collector's attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner's feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility. You should know that in saying this I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust. But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

[...]

O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg,'s "Bookworm." For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be - ownersliip is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.

Some things I love about charity bookshops

As much as I love organisation and detest clutter, there is an undeniable charm about the charity bookshop. Rarely do they sell only books; invariably a selection of inane gift cards and soaps made of elephant dung are sold alongside the musty, cheap, faded Penguin paperbacks. But it’s the book section which is my favourite. There is nothing at all that beats a good rummage, ten minutes spent with your head at a funny angle, sizing up books, and deciding how they’d look in your bedroom (in this sense, charity book shopping is much like sex – something the major booksellers have cottoned onto as well, with ‘feel every word’ slogans and the whoring of books on ‘3 for 2’ offers).

Just like sex too, the results can be disappointing. Most of the stuff in them is, admittedly, a bit naff – Helen Fielding’s heart must sink every time she walks into Oxfam, only to see at least three copies of each of the BJ titles on the shelves (on that note, James Herriot, Dan Brown, and David Blaine must all feel similar. ‘Unfashionable authors’ support group, anyone?). But when you do find a second-hand gem, and it does, occasionally happen, my heart is warmed and I want to show my new book to everyone. The other day I happened upon a short story collection about Edinburgh called ‘One City’. I only went for it because of the contributions from two widely different yet equally wonderful writers – Irvine Welsh and Alexander McCall Smith. Imagine my joy when, 50p later, I open the book only to find their respective signatures gracing the opening page! (There was also a submission from Ian Rankin, so his biro stain was in there too, but I’m not such a fan of crime, so it has a little less resonance than perhaps otherwise.)

Another thing that I love about second hand bookshop is the kind of person who donates. Most people use them as a dumping ground for rubbish found in a dead grandmother’s loft, but the angels of books are those who read the latest literary fiction titles, and feel an altruistic need to dash off to the second hand place. In the same trip as mentioned above, I found a copy of A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book – again, for only 50p (thank you, Salvation Army, for being considerably cheaper than Oxfam). Though not in quite the same vein, I recently saw a copy of Dawn French’s A Tiny Bit Marvellous in a charity shop in Camden, when it was only released in November! So thank you, you lovely people who combine intellectualism with cleanliness, because it is *you* who enable most of my bookcase.

I just wish that more people shared my love of a good find. I just don’t understand the obsession with new books. Surely the history of the book-as-object is fascinating too? My friends and I once held a book swap and all wrote our names in the books - by the time we get round to organising some more, some of those titles will have four or five names in, illustrating the history of the books on their travels from different homes. And who doesn’t love a ‘With all my heart, today and always, Dec 1987’ etching in a book, clearly the scribble of a long-departed, little-appreciated lover?

It is thanks to the charity hand bookshop that I am able to expand my collection (for a later instalment: a little something about Walter Benjamin) at affordable prices (ahem, Waterstone’s!) and for good cause. I just wish there were more of them, and that more people donated better quality titles. The charity book shop is of increasing importance, given recent cuts to library funding, and I hope that in the future, more and more people will be turned onto the charm of a great find.