Long before “working from home” was a phrase people bandied about, Susan Hill decided to spend a year just reading books she already had lying around the house. “Attacking the TBR pile”, as we would put it. Except that she was mixing in a fair proportion of re-reads: the main principle seemed to be to follow her nose and the quasi-random patterns in which books had settled in different parts of her home. And of course this isn’t just a collection of book reviews, she drifts off engagingly into memories from her long career as an author, broadcaster and publisher. Her first novel was published when she was still in her teens, and she’s been in the literary scene long enough to have baby-sat Arnold Wesker’s children and have E M Forster drop a book on her toe in the London Library, so she knew a lot of the writers she is talking about here, and many of them were evidently friends. But she seems to be quite capable of separating the books from the people: V S Naipaul, for example, seems to have been rude to her the one time they met, but she still praises him as one of the best prose-writers of his generation.

A fun little book, which comes with a serious risk of encouraging you to buy more books, even if it doesn’t make you disarrange your home library to increase the serendipity factor… ( )

This book was not at all what I thought it was going to be --- but it turned out to be a touching and thoughtful read that I know I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. Plus, it helped me add A LOT of books to my wishlist!

I started off really liking this author. In my notes, I wrote how great it was to read something like this from an older reader, a British reader, an educated reader, and one who understands quality. A big shift happened somewhere around half way through and I really struggled with my thoughts about her. Then, weirdly and providentially, she actually addressed the very thing close to the end of the book. I feel like I've been on a very long journey with author Susan Hill, even though it took me only two days to read through this short work.

I loved quotes like:

"A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life."

and

"But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books, and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

I loved some of her phraseology: "bumptious", "purple passages", and anthologies that are "puddings full of plums".

I got annoyed when she would make faulty assumptions (prideful remarks?) that one who organizes their books must not be a real reader or that collectors are somehow lesser than whatever she considers herself to be. Like I said, I started out really liking her...then I got to know her.

I started to realize she was a bit over-obsessed with Virginia Woolf. About that same time, I took a little time to research her bio information so when I got to the part in the book about her wanting to "emulate" Woolf in publishing, I was kind of sickened. This book was written before she wrecked her family and knowing what was coming made me wonder how much of her obsession with emulating Woolf played a part in her leaving her 40 year marriage to move in with a female lover. I think it's a heartbreaking poetic justice that her "lover" soon left her and I'm so sad for her poor husband and daughters. I think I've learned my lesson about looking up bios, though. I was enjoying her so much before that.

Weirdly, (prophetically?) she addresses this very issue in an unrelated chapter. She says, "Knowing about a writer's life is rarely necessary to an appreciation of their work. But occasionally it is." And later, speaking of a friend who also read a book by an author who did something he found to be morally wrong: "He was not being judgmental, simply stating a truth. -- that the book which had meant so much to him had been fatally diminished for him when he discovered what had happened." She seems to come to the conclusion later that an author's past, current, and future life should not have any influence on the artistic work they produce. I think this is true, for the most part, but also virtually impossible in reality.

The book ended as it began---fun and informative. I thought her "Bad Bed-Fellows" chapter was pretty creative and thoughtful and I loved this thought she had when seeing related books sitting serendipitously together on a shelf: "Can books learn from one another? Can they change as a result of sitting on a shelf beside another for years? If not, might they regret being forever trapped, as it were, within their own content, doomed never to grow old, never to return to a state before they were created?"

All in all, I didn't love this book, and I have anger issues toward the author, but I'm very glad I read it. It's given me some really worthwhile things to ruminate on. ( )

An enjoyable and interesting read, but oh! the name-dropping (as I said to W H Auden just the other day).

Worth it, because this was interesting and a very engaging read. An awful lot of Austen et al and is there really any need to explain "Austen wrote some good books, you should try them" again? Nice to see a few more obscure names, like Sebald and Causley in there too. ( )

Very enjoyable read about selecting books from the authors book shelves and why she chose them. She gave up buying books for a year and read 40 from her shelves over the year. ( )

This could have been much better - especially if it had accomplished what I thought it was meant to. This was meant as Ms Hill's year spent among her own books, but instead of reading and reporting back, the opportunity was taken to name-drop as often as possible and to talk more broadly about books, often without the sort of specific detail that might convince readers of the quality of the book being discussed. ( )