AS MY COLLEAGUE NEXT DOOR points out, summer vacation, as I used to call it, is nearly over. What that calls to mind for me is not only the books that I might read in the autumn, as Jeanette suggests, but the lists we used to have to keep in the holidays of the books we’d read when we weren’t at school. If memory serves, our teachers handed out a list, and you were supposed to choose at least a few from there, then you were on your own.
I don’t do that any more, but perhaps I’ll start again. I have been inspired by a book that just landed on my desk: The Reader, it’s called, and underneath that it says: “Ali Smith”. It doesn’t say “by”, because it isn’t; it is, rather, “the first in a series of anthologies of favourite writing chosen by writers”.
And it is a real treat. It is more than a commonplace book — a wonderful thing in itself, but anecdotal and made in the moment. It is more like a leisurely browse through a writer’s own bookshelves. And since I am a person who likes almost nothing better than browsing through other people’s bookshelves, especially, of course, people I like, what could be better? Smith’s book — I long to know who else will take part — is divided into sections: “Girls”, “Dialogues”, “Journeys”, “The World”, “Histories”, “Beliefs”. In “Girls”, you’ll find Nell Dunn and Jane Austen, among others; in “Beliefs”, Calvino and Shakespeare. What she takes from Austen is simply a sentence: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her to have been born an heroine.” That’s enough, isn’t it, to send you back to Northanger Abbey. Some pleasures come not in fragments but in wholes: I didn’t know I needed reminding of Larkin’s The Trees, but I did: “Yet still the unresting castles thresh/ In fullgrown thickness every May./ Last year is dead, they seem to say,/ Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”
The books that you read can be the architechture that supports you — you don’t have to be a writer for that to be so. We take from books the equipment that we need to cross chasms or climb mountains or swim rivers; and it’s good, sometimes, to be able to look back at how far you have come and see, perhaps, how you got there. Your list of the books you have read will be a good guide.
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The Reader: Ali Smith (Constable, £12.99; offer, £11.69 from 0870 1608080)