Books, books, books

The other day, my mum told me that one day, when she isn’t quite so busy, she is going to get round to reading all the books on her bookshelf. Ah, I thought - that’s where I get it from! I have So Many Books. They have to be real books: I recently made brief excursion into the world of ebooks but all that did was confirm my suspicion that it isn’t at all the same; no matter how good the content, I don’t seem to lose myself in a Kindle book (other brands are available) in the way that I do in a really good paper-and-ink book. Kindle offers convenience and cost savings, for sure, and when I’m able to travel again I might resort to using it. But apart from that, it’s real, physical books all the way for me.

I find it very hard to part from books that I’ve enjoyed reading. When I find an author I enjoy, I tend to get hold of everything they’ve written, and keep it all. I will re-read books that I read a few years ago, and I enjoy the certainty of knowing that I’ll love reading them. On my bookshelves (and there are lots of them!) you’ll find Philippa Gregory, Colleen McCullough, Jo Nesbo, Faye Kellerman, Erica James, Sharon Penman, James Patterson, Robert Harris, John Grisham, CJ Sansom, Candace Robb, Nicholas Evans, Hilary Mantel, PD James, Camilla Lackberg, Elizabeth George, Joanna Trollope, Catherine Alliott, Georgette Heyer and more, tempered with various biographies, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, CS Lewis’s Narnia books, and Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, a bunch of medieval poets, and various other 30-year-old relics of my English degree. So, basically, the classics, crime fiction, historical fiction, historical crime fiction, and a little romantic fiction and magic to lighten the mix!

And that’s not including my study bookshelves, groaning under the weight of part-read theological books - which one day, like my mum, I will read in full... I sometimes think that one of the attractions of becoming a vicar was so that I could have floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books. That at least is one life-goal achieved, even if reading them all is still an aspiration. How can Kindle possibly compete with a wall of books?!

Given my love of books, one of the ways in which depression hit me hard was in not being able to concentrate. That is improving, but I still find it hard to focus for a length of time, and that includes when reading. I feel disconcerted and out of sorts when I don’t have a good book on the go, when I can’t lose myself in the flow of words and paragraphs and chapters, of character and narrative. Trying out audiobooks has been more successful for me than ebooks; it seems to take less effort then concentrating on the words on a page, and particularly at bedtime I’ve swapped from reading before putting my light out, to setting up Audible on sleep timer instead. Hilary Mantel’s new book, ‘The Mirror and the Light’, provides around 38 hours of listening for one Audible credit, and given I hear about ten minutes’ worth before dropping off it will last me for several months - pretty good value, I reckon.

But I still crave a good hold-in-my-hand book to read. I can feel strangely anxious trying out a new author, and fearful of not being gripped, or of a disappointing ending; I’m hoping the local charity bookshop opens again before too long so that I can try out some different authors and get my reading mojo back.

Even with those difficulties in concentrating, I’ve found a number of books particularly helpful during the last few months as I fell into my dark pit and then tried to find a way out of it. Some of those are shown in the first picture below. If one aspect of reading for me is escapism, getting swept up in a different world, then another is exploring my inner world, my spiritual world, in an attempt to understand myself better and so allow space for more of the healing that I have needed. And then there are things that make me laugh, too, when laughter is in short supply - hence Miranda and also the Lego book. And if you haven’t come across Charlie Mackesy’s wonderful and wise work, it’s in a category of its own, and just makes me feel better. (Another downside of Kindle: I can’t arrange a stack of ebooks and take a photo of them!)

For this hermit, books are a way to venture out, to inhabit a much broader and more varied one than the physical space I am in, to have my imagination stretched and sparked into life. I love the ”Aha!” moments of recognition and insight; the pleasing dropping into place of a perfect phrase that captures something I’ve always felt but hadn’t put into words; the mixture of suspense and satisfactory outcomes in a good plot; the love and warmth that reaches out from the page of a wise writer.

A good book settles me, somehow, even while my mind journeys afar along the roads and tracks opened up on the page. These books are all memories, milestones, words I have travelled with and which have travelled with me. I am at home in the middle of them.