Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home by Susan HillProfile Books, 2010 (originally 2009)

Mm, books. Like, apparently, a lot of other people, I have a habit of acquiring books and then letting them sit on my shelves, unread, while I read something else. I don’t actually buy a ton of books—I do buy some that I’m particularly excited about, and I’m definitely guilty of, say, buying paperbacks at Heathrow to use up that stray £10 note before I get on the plane home—but nevertheless my shelves fill up with books I get as gifts, books I pick up off the sidewalk, books I pick up in the lobby of our building, books I pick up from the free-books shelves in the kitchen at work. And then there’s my library habit: I can’t seem to have a library trip on which I return more books than I check out. So: right: not reading the books I already own: this is a problem I have, a common problem, it seems, and Susan Hill had it too. So she decided, one day while hunting for a book on her shelves and not finding it (but finding lots of other interesting books), that she would spend a year reading only books from her own shelves.

Howards End is on the Landing, the book that came out of that decision, is the story of Hill’s exploration of her bookshelves (of which there are many), but it’s also the story of her reading life, and a bit the story of her writing life and her social life. It’s made of short chapters that cover many things book-related: pop-up books, Dickens (she’s a fan), things that fall out of books, Patrick Leigh Fermor (again, she’s a fan), writing in books, and so on. The Sitwells make an appearance, as do E.M. Forster and V.S. Naipaul (the people, I mean, not just their writing: Hill has met a number of writers over the course of her own career as one).

When it’s engaging, this book is really engaging: I loved, for example, Hill’s description of reading mysteries from the Golden Age of the Detective Story for fun during her student days and how:

Many of them were set in a London which then (1960) had barely changed since the time in which they were written. The docks were still the docks, and the Port of London one of the busiest commercial ports in the world; the river that ran past my college was packed with working boats and barges. Fleet Street was down the road and the printing presses still produced papers from there — turn up a side alley and a door opening off the street looked down into a Dante’s Inferno of noise and roaring machinery. There were bowler hats in the City and in all the lawyers’ offices and barristers’ chambers of Gray’s Inn and Temple; boys with stubs of pencils behind their ears running about with early evening papers, shouting the headlines; costermongers in Covent Garden, and flowers in the flower market. (14)

Or there’s the part about Aldeburgh, where Benjamin Britten (whose settings of poems led Hill to some of her favorite poets) lived, of which Hill says:

I walked the shingle beach and the steep, narrow streets, I bought a mug in the shop run by Mrs Beech, where Britten had bought a string of them with which to improvise a musical instrument. I watched the lifeboat go out to rescue a fishing boat and saw others sail out every day from the beach just below the window of the house I was renting. (206)

In addition to these atmospheric parts, I like it when Hill goes into some depth about particular books and authors she likes, and why she likes them or what she finds in them. I think the section on W.G. Sebald (whose work I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t yet) and the section about Elizabeth Bowen (ditto) are good examples of this. Of Bowen’s style, Hill says this, which totally makes me want to go read something by Bowen sooner rather than later: “The broad canvas is not for her. She expresses, describes, highlights by a perfect use of detail — a lace doily with a few crumbs left on a plate, a pair of chamois-leather gloves being buttoned at the wrist, a man striking a match in the street to light the cigarette of a stranger, food, drink, items of clothing” (140).

But a lot of the book felt very light, and not necessarily in a good way. (Possibly I just don’t like books with this short-snippets-of-things format that much: another book I had similar issues with was Nigel Slater’s Eating for England.) Funny, sometimes, and charming, sometimes, but not exactly what I was in the mood for. Sometimes, the attempts at humor just fall flat: e.g., on not liking Alice Munro, Hill says: “”I have a problem with Canadian as I do with Australian writers. (I know, I know.)” (101). Really? Because Canadian authors and Australian authors are all the same? Not funny. A fair chunk of the book is also devoted to pondering which forty books Hill would want to keep, if she could read only those 40 for the rest of her life. This is sometimes interesting, particularly when Hill goes into depth about which books she’d want and why, but sometimes it just feels like a way to fill space.