World Book Day

In honour of World Book Day I decided today I'd spend my day with some books. You know, like every day.

I started by taking a peek as the first book of "The Hunger Games". There are movie posters plastered all over Paris. I started getting curious. I read about twenty pages or so, but stopped because I kept thinking of another book, Koushun Takami's "Battle Royale". Apparently I'm not the only one that thought this.

I look around my desk. There's a worn paperback copy of Richard Jeffries' "After London & Wild England", a copy of Eugene Zamiatin's "We" (which heavily inspired Orwell's "1984"), and a near pristine copy of Takami's "Battle Royale"... I notice that all three books are about a future gone horribly wrong.

This isn't the only theme of the books I find on my desk this afternoon, though it's the most obvious.

Stacked up on the corner are: Dante's "Purgatorio", Sawako Ariyoshi's "The River Ki", Morio Kita's "The Fall of the House of Nire", Andersen's "Fairy Tales" illustrated by Arthur Szyk, [W. Somerset] "Maugham on Kipling", "The Travels of Marco Polo", and Alberto Manguel's "Dictionary of Imaginary Places".

Those books all share a common denominator in a way that makes sense to me. They each contain something important. That's the thing. I don't read for pleasure any more. Not really. The act of reading is a pleasure in itself, but I read for the sake of perfecting my craft as a writer nowadays. I want to see the style, the way ideas were developed, and how the writing is overall.

I asked on Twitter today "What's your favourite book?" Your one favourite. The book you could not live without reading again. It's a question that I cannot even answer simply myself. The books that spring to mind are not books I've read to perfect my craft as a writer. They are instead, the books that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

The books. Not just one book. I cannot point to a single book and say after reading it that I knew I wanted to be a writer. The books that come to mind, most of them are books I wish I'd written myself. In the instance of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" I wish I'd written each and every single word. Maugham is, without overthinking it, my favourite author (in the English language). I still wax poetic about one his short stories, "Rain" every chance I get. He is the author that has the something I wish and hope I have as a writer.

Writers I'd love to borrow talent from could be their own list. Colette, Nabokov, George Orwell,  Mikhail Bulgakov, Ken Kesey, Yukio Mishima, and Henry Miller along with Maugham would top this list.

Then there's the ideas I wish I'd come up with myself.  

Discovering a world in a wardrobe.

A wrongly imprisoned man uses a treasure to seek revenge.

Satan comes to Moscow.

A cat narrates the lives of Japan's middle class.

(Books in order: C.S. Lewis "The Chronicles of Narnia", Alexandre Dumas Pere "La comte de Monte Cristo", Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", Natsume Soseki's "I Am A Cat")

Or first lines.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

You better not never tell nobody but God.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Walking back to camp through the swamp, Sam wondered if he should tell his father what he had seen.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

(Books in order:  JRR Tolkien "The Hobbit", JD Salinger "The Catcher In the Rye", Sylvia Plath "The Bell Jar", Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis, Alice Walker "The Color Purple", C.S. Lewis "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", E.B. White "The Trumpet of the Swan", George Orwell "1984")

Then I think back to my first books. The fairy tales stories; the books written for children; the books that seemed written for children, but were for adults too; and then the books I read that weren't for children.

Mitch Hedburg said, "any book is a kid's book if the kid can read". He obviously never read Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", which I read first at age 12 and completely misunderstood. I've read it many times since at 14, 22, and aged 28. At each point in its reading I have had a different gut reaction to the story. This is why it's one of my favourite books.

When it comes to my absolute Top Five Desert Island books, it's hard to make a final selection. This indecisiveness hovers because I can't make up mind about what or which criteria is most important to me.

So fine I'm going to pick five. But I'm not going to hold myself to it. Because I'm going to read all my life. I'll never stop. It's a lifelong disease I've got. Can't walk past a bookshop without having a book. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if I perished in a fire unable to be put out because I, known to the neighbours as the Crazy Book Lady fell asleep chain smoking in a room piled to the ceiling with hardly flame retardant books.

But fine. Here they are:

My Top Five Desert Island Books:

1. George Orwell, "1984"

2. W. Somerset Maugham "The Razor's Edge"

3. R.L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island"

4. Alexandre Dumas Pere "La comte de Monte Cristo"

5. A book of collected fairy tales

I tried to stay away from series of books otherwise "The Chronicles of Narnia", which I read in part or in full every year and have since I was a kid (along with "La comte de Monte Cristo") would have made the list. I might have also picked Mishima's "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, of which the first book in the series, "Spring Snow", is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read.

"1984" will always be on the list. I never knew books like "1984" existed until I read it. I felt the same way when I read Orwell's "Animal Farm".

"Treasure Island" makes the list because the edition I have in my library includes Stevenson's essay from "The Art of Writing" that made me realise that it was time for me to try being a writer and stop feckin' about.

But it's the book of fairy tales that gave me the most trouble. I couldn't pick which collection it'd be. I'd want the complete set of Andrew Lang's "Fairy Books" with me. I'd want a copy of "The Brothers Grimm". I'd want the encyclopedia of fairy tales I had as a child called "Le cabinet des fées", which had forty volumes and is so precious that I refuse to re-read my childhood copy because it's quite old and sentimental to me.

I think to myself for a moment. Would those be my favourite books? The first books I ever loved? Cherished? They're still precious to me. But I cannot remember their stories as vividly as I can recall others.

I look at the shelves. There's about 1,700 books in the library. A hundred of them probably a favourite.

When people come to the house they're always amazed by the library. I tell them it's not even one half of my actual library. There's another 17,000 + books in storage. Then there's the books I want to have in my library and my visions of what this library will be like. What kind of bookshelves I want. How much space I'll dedicate to a library. (A lot.) How it will be organised.

Once I have more library space, I tell them, the first books I plan to buy is a reading copy of "Le cabinet des fées". I will put my childhood copy safely behind glass (there will be bookshelves with glass doors for rare books and first editions) and will dedicate an entire section of my library to fairy tales and mythology. There will be shelves devoted to children's books, reference books, poetry, fiction, philosophy...

I go on.

I will build my library inspired by the collecting and collections of Andrew Lang, Captain Sir Richard Burton (I already have a rare 16 volume set of his Arabian Nights), Jorge Luis Borges (I am a big collector of his works), and of course Peter and Iona Opie - who left their impressive collection to The Bodelian Library at Oxford containing:

A collection of works written or published for children, or related thereto, mainly British, totalling c. 20,000 items, put together from the mid 1940s to the early 1980s as a private research resource, rich in terms of rarity and deep in terms of quantity of variant editions, ranging in date from the 16^th to the 20^th century, including c. 800 18^th century books. Includes much of Roland Knaster’s collection, strong in foreign books and books of the 1920s and 1930s. Arranged in c. 20 categories, relating either to form or subject (when a category contains a good proportion of early books it is subdivided into pre- and post- 1850): stories (over 1,400 pre-1850 and 2,700 post-1850 items); books of instruction (over 360 pre-1850 and 280 post-1850 items); fables, legends, and fairy tales (over 1,200 items); biography and history (over 270 pe-1850 and 250 post-1850 items); moveables (over 70 pre-1850 and 470 post-1850 items); natural science (over 280 pre-1850 and 450 post-1850 items); primers and alphabets (over 340 pre-1850 and 320 post-1850 items); travel and geography (over 200 pre-1850 and 100 post-1850 items); periodicals and annuals (over 40 pre-1850 and 900 post-1850 items);games and pastimes (over 90 pre-1850 and 1,200 post-1850 items); religious instruction (over 360 pre-1850 and 290 post-1850 items); toy-books (over 1,000 items); nursery rhymes (over 1,000 items); poetry and verse (over 540 pre-1850 and 770 post-1850 items); keepsakes and miscellanies, almanacs and birthday books (over 40 pre-1850 and 160 post-1850 items); drama (over 190 items); music (over 170 items); foreign languages (over 1,300 items); hornbooks, cabinets, etc.; copy, exercise and drawing books; manuscripts and original artwork; ephemera. Accompanying the collection are records of the books: catalogue cards, accession diaries, notes loosely inserted into books, etc. Acquired by the Bodleian in 1988 after a public appeal, Iona Opie donating half the value of the collection.

20,000 items, I say excitedly. I don't go into the specifics - that's just for your benefit. I revel in my bibliomania a little more. I confess all my dreams and plans.

When they've suffered through all of that (but I can't help myself) they say "they don't have the money" or "they don't have the space" to indulge their own love of books, but like me they have books they love and lists of books they want to read and sometimes books they hope they'll write.

And that's when my heart breaks a little. I don't go into the stories about how I have starved for books. How I've sacrificed. How I've traveled the world for them and with them. I'm proud of my library, but the purpose has always been to one day share it. 

One day I'll have a house in Amsterdam with a TARDIS front door. A house that like the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. I will make cakes and invite people to tea for interesting conversations about books. I will serve delicious dinners to guests who will gravitate towards the library, who won't hear me calling them to the dining room because they're lost in a book.  I will open my library up to children who can come and look at the books in the collection and read and have little paper library cards like I did when I was a child.

The first book I ever took out of a library with my library card was about coccinelle, ladybugs to Americans, what you call ladybirds in the UK. They became my favourite insect. Nearly 30 years later I still have a special fondness for them. I still remember their wings beat faster than a hummingbird's. It's probably because of that book that I ran outside on a cold grey day to take this photograph.

This is what I can see by turning my head to look out of the window next to my desk.

Happy World Book Day, books. Every day should be World Book Day.