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

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.

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.

Have you ever thought of your library as a repository of memories and a world ready to be (re)discovered? Susan Hill's book " Howard's End is On the Landing" is the enchanting, haphasard voyage through her own library of a delightful writer who has encoutered the most fascinating intellectuals of today all over the world and has had the greatest adventures. You read and not only you follow her as a perfect intellectual guide, but you learn to look at your own books in a way quite different from before: no more like heavy object, getting covered with dust, waiting for you to take to the nearest garbage pan, but like valuable jewel-cases filled with episodes of your life.

I'm a Susan Hill fan of the highest order; if she writes it, I'll read it. Unfortunately, I never warmed to this--while she is as technically gifted as she always has been, the subject matter just isn't that exciting. Memoir/memoir-adjacent books are of most interest to the person writing them, after which there is a considerable drop-off in appeal for the average reader (some people love memoirs! I get antsy and bored. The anecdotes are too niche, the jokes too insider-ish.) Hill's literary tastes skew heavily towards midcentury European novels (many of them out of print) in which I have little interest. With barely any crossover interest between my taste and hers, I struggled to stay engaged. The anecdotes about authors she's met over the years were more of the same--so-and-so wrote a book in the 60's, they had lunch once, they discussed books, etc. etc. Unless you share Hill's very specific literary tastes, you won't find much here to make this a re-read. This is perhaps better off enjoyed as a library loan--fine to read once but nothing you need to own.

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.

The fine British Gothic and mystery novelist Susan Hill starts this study with the intent only for a year to read books she already owns in her sprawling book-lined country house; the work ends with a list of the forty she ultimately chooses, but what's in between is not a diary of her reading so much as an overview of the books she loves and those that have particularly shaped her. (First among these, and she herself will admit, is Virginia Woolf's A WRITER'S DIARY, and readers more used to Hill's usual very different style, employed in works like I'M KING OF THE CASTLE or THE WOMAN IN BLACK is here replaced by a voice very much akin to the conversational tone of Woolf's A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN or especially THE COMMON READER.) You do have to be prepared for Hill's Anglo-American chauvinism; she discusses very few works by French or Russian writers, and admits a peculiar prejudice she never quite explains against Australian and Canadian fiction (which is too bad, because I kept thinking how much she'd like Robertson Davies). A large part of the book involves Hill's own relationships or encounters with the British writers she admires, which is not surprising given how small the English writers' community can be: only rarely does she employ a distastefully "luvvy" tone with the writers she admires (most egregiously in the case of Bruce Chatwin), and for the most part her anecdotes are quite illuminating and intriguing. Less eclectic in her choices (bot also for the most part less twee) than Nancy Pearl, this is a celebration of books by a woman who genuinely loves them and who wants to share her choices with other readers. The highest praise I can give Susan Hill's book is that it well deserves the beautiful paperback cover Profile Books provided for the American edition: you can profitably judge it by its lovely cover.

Susan Hill's Howard's End is on the Landing is filled with wonderful sentences like this: " There is no reason why most of the books I own but have never actually read should be more or less in one place. They just are. Maybe they quietly gravitate into the sitting room one by one, to sob and huddle together for warmth." Ms Hill, the author of the Simon Serrialler mystery series, has written a wonderful bookish memoir about her resolve to read those things that are already on her shelves. As she goes through the books she selects 40 that could last her for the rest of her life. My own collection didn't get any smaller as a result of reading her: I now own Journeying Boy: The Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, The Smoking Diaries, Volume I by Simon Gray, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, and several more volumes by Ms. Hill. Maybe NOW I'll stick to the books I already own. I just have to avoid reading other books like this.

She is 2 years older than me, but we were both at university in the early 60's this book brought back some memories of the time, I was in the US, she in London, but shared culture of the times. Her criticism of her year of reading is right on, it is eclectic and well worth reading and considering. buy and read the book!

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

Absolutely wonderful. I enjoyed reading this very much (and found myself buying more and more books along the way). Susan Hill knows about literature and has a delightful way of sharing her knowledge. Enjoyable and inspriring.

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.

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.

I selected this book off my to-read shelf where it has sat for at least two years and, on reading the first paragraph, knew I must read on. ‘Howards End is on the Landing’ by Susan Hill is a gem of a memoir, a year in the life of a crime novelist who decides to read only the books on her bookshelves. But this is more than a review of books – it can be dipped in and out of, the chapters are conveniently short which makes you want to read ‘just another’ – because Hill attaches a personal story to each book, each author. I have always felt an affinity with Susan Hill; she was born eight miles from my own Yorkshire birthplace, and I was intrigued to learn about why she writes. I learned so much more; how her first novel was published when she was only eighteen, how she lives an ordinary life but mixes with some breath-stopping names. She met and/or knew TS Eliot, EM Forster, Cecil Day Lewis, Penelope Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen; it is a mirror image of my reading list at university, except for the Bond. Above everything though, the book reveals Hill as a reader who devours everything from Dickens to WG Sebald, Anthony Trollope to Anita Brookner, John le Carre to Olivia Manning. Her bookshelves contain signed copies, first editions, expensive sets, anthologies and poetry, plus shabby cheap paperbacks bought at airports and train stations, or second hand in charity shops. She writes in her books, turns down the corners of pages, discovers things used years ago as bookmarks – bills, paid and unpaid; receipts; picture postcards; shopping lists. She is, like you and I, someone who loves reading books. I recognised her description of reading library books as a child. “Although when I was a child and growing up I could borrow books every week from the library, there was a limit on the number to be taken at any one time and so, as there was not the money to buy many books either, I found myself reading, re-reading and re-reading again. If I liked a library book I simply got to the end, turned it round and began again. It was a bit like sweets. Until I was ten, sweets were rationed. I had a quarter of a pound a week and there were various ways in which they could be made to last. A sweet a day. Buy only boiled sweets which could be sucked for a long time. Suck half and re-wrap the rest until tomorrow. Occasionally I would have such a sugar-craving that I bought something that was gobbled up in a great burst of sweetness that exploded in the mouth like a firework and then was gone. Sherbet lemons were like that. Marshmallows did not last long.” I turned my library books round and began again, too. I also read my mother’s books. That’s how, as a young teenager, I discovered Mary Stewart. This is a delightful slim paperback which made me want to re-read many novels first read forty years ago, and to try authors I have always meant to read such as Sebald and PG Wodehouse.