Stacks, Shelves | Howards End Is On The Landing

It seems somehow winningly appropriate that a day after my completing 
Howards End Is On The Landing, the excellent Brian Bilston then posted this: 

'Today’s poem is called ‘Tsondoku’ after the Japanese word for 

allowing books to pile up in your house without reading them.'

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I'd clocked this title in 2017 whilst searching the library database for a copy of Howards End. Something in the lyrical nature of this title appealed to me so it went onto my saved list for a time. 

  I’ve known of Susan Hill, the novelist since reading The Woman In Black in Year 9, I think. I wasn’t much taken by it at the time but perhaps that was more to do with the nature of enforced group study than anything else. I know I'd now love to see its acclaimed staged version sometime if it ever tours this way again. 

  Reading around the book before starting it myself, I found some of its past readers were a bit sniffy about the number of names Hill mentions. But I didn't really interpret that as a vainglorious name-dropping exercise of hers. If anything, it felt as much to do with the respect and awe she had as a young student, & later as a novelist, to be encountering any one of those Greats whom she so admired in the flesh & off, away from their written pages. Fair play to her, I reckon.

  I enjoyed how she broke her book up into themed sections, the titles of which I could certainly identify from my own bookshelves & reading habits.

Things That Fall Out Of Books | Writing In Books | 

A Book By Its Cover |  Never Got Round To It |  

The Dregs:

Non-books do, though. Small hardbacked books bought in the run-up to Christmas or Valentine's or Mother's Day are non-books.   [...]   Non-books breed, too. Books about Everything Being Rubbish breed others the same or, contrariwise, books about Everything Being Wonderful...  they come in handy for Boxing Day, when people lie idly... After Christmas, their place is the charity shop but, as such books are often rather small in stature, they manage to hide themselves in the cracks between normal books and so go unnoticed...  [135]  

I appreciated her insights and asides about the nature of reading.

And here, at last, I find what I am looking for - a book to read.

If ever I am in this restless and unsettled book-reading state, I know

what will always satisfy me, always interest me, always welcome me into

the depths of its being. [80]

Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language... It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps form us as complete human beings.  [172]  

and of revisiting,  

none of these fade over time, meeting them again is always a pleasure  [108]

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Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. Then one plunges into the dark stretch again. [106] 

A whole chapter on Woolf which brought me joy,  

[On A Writer's Diary]  I was enthralled by this extraordinary woman & her work & I have been ever since. She was unique, a genius, a rare & strange artist as well as an ordinary, thinking, feeling human being  [...]   all of it was revelatory to me as a beginner. It still is. [128]

On the whole, I prefer to keep a writer out of their work. [...]  But with Virginia Woolf, it is different. I am drawn to her, though I think it probable that we would have found nothing to say to one another.  [129]

whilst extending my 'To Read' list further still by her various recommendations. 

I think I'm ready for some fiction now, following several non-fiction reads, but I'm still glad I took the time to read this one. And that I bought the one with the prettiest cover too. 

Time to pass it along to another book-loving friend who'll appreciate it.

Hill, Susan. Howards End Is On The Landing. Profile Books: London, 2010.