Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home

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

I love this book - it is interesting, comforting, gossipy, knowledgable and easy to dip in and out of. Susan Hill is such an easy writer to read and I’ve bought 3 copies of this so I can share with friends.

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.

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.