Just spent an enjoyable half-hour flicking through Susan Hill's new book, Howards End is on the Landing – you can read the first chapter on the site today, here. The premise is that, while digging around her shelves for an elusive book one afternoon, she finds herself sucked into one of those reading-vortices where one book pulls you on to the next, and the next, and the next … As a result of realising just how many unread ("perhaps a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred"), forgotten and well-loved but long-unopened titles her library contains, she decides to give up book-buying for a year and "get to know [her] own books again".
It's a nifty notion, and it led me to run a mental finger down my own shelves and pick out the as-yet-unconsumed books that are sitting there. As it happens, my shelves are currently limited to three - most of my books are in storage – but even there I can think of two books – a hardback Complete Works of Nathanael West and a secondhand paperback of JB Priestley's The Good Companions – off the top of my head. I plan to read them both (one was a much-appreciated Christmas present, the other picked up for a quid at the Hay festival last May), but deadlines, work-reading and, in the case of the West, weight, have, until now, dissuaded me. The danger, of course, is that if you don't read something in the first couple of weeks of ownership it can slide off your radar and end up being tidied to a high shelf where it sits gathering dust until the last trump sounds: an ignoble fate for anyone, let alone JB Priestley.
So here's a Friday challenge – how about we all check our bookcases, bedside tables and bedroom floors for unread books, and read one of them this weekend, instead of buying something else? I'll embark on West, and report back on Monday morning ...
