This is a year of reading from home, by one of Britain's most distinguished authors. Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. "Howard's End is on the Landing" charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
*Starred Review* One day British novelist Susan Hill went to the bookshelves in her home looking for a copy of Howards End. She didn’t find it (at least not at first), but she did come upon several other books she had never read. That started her thinking: Why not devote a year’s reading time just to the books on her own shelves? The project launched, she began a systematic browse through all the books in her house (it’s an old house with lots of floors and shelves on every floor, not to mention the landings between floors). This delightful bibliophile’s memoir records her experience, both the browsing and the reading. Along the way, she developed a kind of second project: If she could only keep 40 books, which ones would they be? The list of 40 appears at the end, and it’s a charmingly eccentric batch of books, but the real fascination in reading Hill’s ruminations isn’t about the list but, rather, about how she reads and how living with books enriches her life. Those who collect books in any fashion will be lost in their own memories as Hill muses on “things that fall out of books,” or defends writing in books, or, best of all, argues against overorganizing the books on her shelves (no more wonderful surprises). Just try to read this book without nosing around your own shelves. --Bill Ott
--This text refers to the
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About the Author
Susan Hill is the winner of numerous prestigious literary awards. The Man in the Picture was published by Profile in 2007, and she is the author of a highly successful crime series (Chatto & Windus). The Woman in Black has been running in the West End for 20 years.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delight,
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This review is from: Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (Hardcover)
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.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but somewhat limiting,
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This review is from: Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (Hardcover)
Howards End is on the Landing is a short collection of essays in which Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black, went on a search through her house to find a book--and found hundreds that she hadn't read, and dozens more that she had forgotten she owned but wanted to return to. She then resolved to read more books from her ever-growing collection, making a vow to not buy any more books (more power to her!) There were a couple of caveats: she would still accept books from publishers, for example.
The essays in this book aren't organized in any particular way, so Hill's discourses tend to be a bit random at times; but her writing style is superb, and she writes well about the books she loves and doesn't love. Be warned, however, that there's a fair amount of literary name-dropping (everything from "EM Forster once dropped a book on my foot when I was a student at King's College" to various authors she's been acquainted with over hr literary career), which sort of put me off after a while. There are also a number of inconsistencies (her husband is a Shakespearean scholar, yet Hill dismisses other Elizabethan poets as not worthy of her time because people have never heard of them; she claims she'll never read a Richard and Judy selection, so why does she keep buying them?). Hill tends to dismiss certain types of books (fantasy, historical fiction) and Australian and Candian authors as not worthy of her time, and her tastes tend to run towards 20th century fiction for the most part. She claims that Jane Austen isn't her cup of tea (different strokes for different folks, I guess) and tends to promote authors that you might not have heard of--which is good in a way, as she's given me a number of new-to-me authors to track down; and she's also inspired me to read more from my TBR pile (she mentions FM Mayor's the Rector's Daughter, which has been on my TBR list for a while, and I've had Dorothy Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club on my bookshelves for a long time as well). I also wish that Hill had given us a full list of the books she read during her year--and that she'd read more from her unread pile (it's fine to revisit the books you've always loved, I do that sometimes, but surely there should also be an effort to broaden your horizons, so to speak?). Hill does give a list of the forty books she'd take with her to a desert island--the Bible, for example, or Wuthering Heights. I also wish there had been an index of the books mentioned in this one, as she mentions perhaps hundreds, either in depth or in passing. Despite my reservations about this book, I did enjoy parts of it. It's perhaps just not the best book about books there is to be had.
30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A bibliophile's delight...,
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This review is from: Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (Hardcover)
This slim volume turned out to be one of the best books I've read in 2009 -- by a very wide margin indeed.
Susan Hill, best known to me for her excellent series of mysteries featuring her detective, Simon Serrailler, doesn't just read. She has a reading life, and in this gently rambling rumination on her books, their place in her house, her life and her heart, she shares that life with her readers. It all begins with Hill's quest for a single book -- Howards End. When she can't locate it, but can locate dozens of other books in her vast collection that seems to occupy every spare inch of wallspace in her Gloucestershire home that she either has never read or wants to re-read, she resolves to spend a year without buying any new books. Instead, she'll read what she already has. Unlike Phyllis Rose in The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time and other books about reading by authors, this quasi-memoir doesn't require us to accompany Hill as she reads her way through the books and combines her reflections on them with a chronicle of her year of reading and how it changed her life (as the convention would dictate...) Instead, we are given an insight into the process by which she chooses books to read, and ultimately, forces herself to narrow her selection to a mere 40 that she could enjoy reading and re-reading for the rest of her life without ever reading a new book, if required to do so. (Just the thought of being forced to narrow my own reading down that dramatically causes me to shudder in horror.) She reflects on the authors she has encountered -- Iris Murdoch, Ian Fleming -- and those she loves. I don't always share her tastes (she'd take Macbeth to her imaginary desert island; I'd take The Tempest) but that isn't the point of the book. It's the experience of reading, and the way in which reading a book can transform your life that Hill manages to convey in crisp, elegant and downright beautiful prose that make this volume so wonderful. This was a six-star book for me; I'd highly recommend to anyone who is even remotely in love with their books and with reading.
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