Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home

One fall afternoon, while looking for a book she wanted to read in her extensive collection, Susan Hill discovers other books she purchased but hadn't read, or books she'd even forgotten she'd purchased, along with books she realized she wanted to read again. Hill resolves to buy no new books (except for volumes she needs to read in connection with work) until she plows through her to-be-read and begging-to-be re-read piles.This slim but delightful volume reminds one of her nature volume THE MAGIC APPLE TREE, but with books instead of the countryside, allowing her to review her life with books. She wanders happily from her old "Observer" books on trees and airplanes and how good titles entice you into a literary world and the magic of Dorothy Sayers to Shakespeare, Dickens, and poetry to the joy of finding things in used books to the favorites she turns to along with the strange volumes she's found around the house. Even if you are young and American and recognize few of the titles and authors you cannot but help be caught up in her memories and recollections and obvious affection for certain writers and her books. A delight for any bibliophile.

I have been seeing reviews of this book on blogs and recommendations from friends for a while now and I have been very excited to read this book because of the idea behind the book. Imagine reading only books that are on your bookshelves for a whole year, what might you discover? I have to admit that when I started to read this book I found it be a lot different than I had expected. I thought it would be a journey though the books Hill decides to read during this year and her thoughts and feelings. I discovered this book to be much different, and I would describe it as a writer's memoir of her reading career. Hill describes books she discovered as she canvassed her shelves to find something to read and how these books affected her in her life, writing and personal. If you can get used to the name dropping she does, in my opinion she has had an interesting and exciting literary life from her college days bumping into E.M. Forrester from her adult years interviewing some of the most fascinating authors of the time. While I might not agree with some of her opinions on books and authors for example, Jane Austen, I found all of her thoughts interesting and vibrant, she infuses them with such depth and humor it is easy to see why she has become such a popular and favorite writer herself. The only thing I think would have made this book better would be a list of all the books she read during her year of reading from home because she mentions so many it is hard to keep track of what she really read and what she just discovered in her search for a book to read. Though different from what I expected I enjoyed reading this book and I can agree with everyone who suggested reading it, because it provided funny and interesting reading.

I recommend this book to anyone who has a large home library or has a lifetime of reading memories. If you do, you probably have a score of books that you haven't read. There are also books that you don't remember purchasing. Finally, you probably have books that you either want to read again or you don't remember reading in the first place. Well, this book is for you. Ms. Hill gives the reader an informal tour of her book collection.She connects books with moments in her life. The book is enchanting and charming. When you finish the book, you will want to revisit you collection, and you will add titles to your must read list.

I wanted to love this so much more than I did. I think because I read another book like this recently, by another author, about the books he loved and that influenced him, this one fell so short. I found Ms. Hill's a bit dry and tedious at times. Although I know some people find her 'name dropping' in the book a bit much, I actually liked hearing about the authors or musicians she met.This is a book you want to read with highlighter in hand to mark the authors and books she talks about. I kept going back and forth between review sites and her book, which I find enjoyable. I now have a list of many other books to read.She talks about books as she picks them up and takes them off the shelves, and mentions many famous writers that she's met and read, but even as the book ended, I'm not actually sure what she read during that year! At the end is a list of her top forty that she can't live without.

Last night I read Susan Hill's HOWARDS END IS ON THE LANDING, which I first heard of in one of the recent 2009 Best Books About Books lists. It has a lovely bookish dustjacket and its spine is strikingly beautiful on the shelf. Susan Hill has written 37 books and her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and have won the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. Her husband is the Shakespeare scholar, Professor Stanley Wells. This is my first book by her.The subtitle of the book is A YEAR OF READING FROM HOME, and in it the author travels through her large personal library, selecting forty books to read in a year devoted to capturing literature that she has passed over or meant to read and for some reason didn't.Her book discussions are peppered with personal recollections of encounters with famous authors. She admits a blind spot for certain classic authors, including Proust. She says "I have read THE YEAR OF READING PROUST by Phyllis Rose, and Alain de Botton's marvellously enlightening, engaging, thought-provoking HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE but cannot make it through a Proust volume itself.Mostly though, it is authors she already likes that she is now determined to visit. You may have read part of an author's works, but what of those others you meant to read and didn't. And so she takes a year off from reading new books and devotes herself to reading the old ones in her personal library.It is a nicely bookish book.

Lovely journey through the books and memories of Susan Hill.A goldmine of what to read next!

I found this book magnificent. Beautifully written, suggestive, a journey through books and life.Each chapter is about different books and subjects and it’s full of anecdotes on Hill’s life, on her experience as a reader and writer, on her meeting famous authors, on reading and much more, written in a magnificent, poetic, elegant and suggestive style. We discover (or re-discover) forgotten or underrated authors and we feel the need to be nurtured by them.Hill is a true writer. She masters literature, she studied it, she absorbed it, she lived it and has created a masterpiece, a book that should be translated and published everywhere, a book to study, especially by the thousand of people who nowadays write and self-publish.The book also tackles the lost sense of reading today and the "competition mania" (my words) and many other interesting subjects.It's a book that I'll definitely recommend and read again.

A lovely personal account of one year's worth of reading. Great recommendations.

Tuve en mente este libro desde que descubrí que existía y no paré hasta comprarlo. La idea base de Susan Hill de redescubrir su propia biblioteca me pareció muy interesante, quizá porque esperaba lecciones magistrales sobre escritura y escritores, sobre lectura y lectores de esta reconocida escritora y editora. Sin embargo, tengo que decir que me ha defraudado. Creo que no va más allá de lo meramente anecdótico, hechos circunstanciales sin mucha relevancia y trascendencia. Me hubiera encantado escribir otra opinión pero no es posible.

Susan Hill's latest is a memoir about reading the books in her house and the stories they are associated with. At the heart of HEIOTL, as I shall abbreviate it to, is Hill's decision not to add to her house full of books for a year (except for books she is to review); to explore her collection and find new books to read in it, to re-discover lost gems and re-read favourites, and then to compile a list of the forty books she couldn't live without.Each shelf examined brings reminiscences. There are stories about encounters with great writers and celebrated personages, who all seemed to be very supportive of the young novelist, and indeed many of them became friends. I loved all this name-dropping, and particularly enjoyed the chapter about Benjamin Britten whose 'Sea Interludes' provided an epiphany for Hill (I love them too - they were marvellous to play many years ago in Croydon Youth Philharmonic Orchestra); the story about Alan Clark was good also.There are many discussions of writers and their books. Hill is refreshingly honest about what she doesn't enjoy reading as well as her literary loves - she's no Austenite, but reveres much of Thomas Hardy, she can't be doing with Terry Pratchett and Sci-Fi in general but did concede to liking John Wyndham but puts him in the horror pile. I was delighted that she loves Ian Fleming, John Le Carré and Michael Connelly too.Although I haven't read him, her chapter about W.G.Sebald does make me want to read The Rings of Saturn. She writes "But so many places on a Sebald journey are eerie, deserted, out of date, and lie under a pall of dismal weather. In The Rings of Saturn he walks through East Anglia and manages to make places I know well, and have found sparkling and lively, suicidally depressing." I lived and worked for nearly two years in and around Great Yarmouth - a South Londoner fresh out of uni and mostly have never felt so lonely as then.Then at the last pages we get to the final forty, the snapshot in time of the forty books she couldn't do without - well on that day at least, for she says she would probably pick a different 40 tomorrow. The natural extension of this is to start compiling one's own forty - but that's a project for another day ...Every year I say I must read more books from my TBR mountains. Do I think I could do as Hill did and not buy any new books for a whole year? It would be nice, but I don't think I can. My biggest problem post-HEIOTL is the number of books I've added to my wishlist, and may have to buy/acquire, after reading it - an index would have been slightly helpful here! I love reading books about books, and this one (with its lovely cover) didn't disappoint at all.