Christmas is not a day, but a season.  My favourite part is between Christmas Day and the New Year celebrations when, if I’m lucky, there are a few tranquil days when I can sit and be quiet with some reading knowing there is a fridge full of food.

Here are two books that always come out at that time:

These are my reading diaries.  Month by month, since I was about twenty, I have recorded the books I read.  For a long time I just noted the author and the book title.  In recent years I sometimes record a few thoughts on the book in question, but it’s not systematic.

The blue diary was the first one.  It begins in summer 1984 (with Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native) and ends in July 1998 (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark).  I bought it in the Post Office, it has one of those faintly textured board coverings that hides stains from coffee cups quite well but not quite well enough.  I remember buying it and wondering whether I should buy half a dozen, thinking that I would be needing more in years to come.  But student frugality stopped me.  It is a very good book: after thirty years it is holding together really well.

By the time summer 1998 came round I was silly enough to buy something more glamorous, hence volume 2, covered in velvet and with a spine in fraying metallic gold and red fabric.  The price was £15.95 according to the label that is still inside the cover, but I got it in the sale.  I regretted it almost instantly – it is pretty, but it has been on the verge of falling to bits ever since I got it.  It opens with W G Sebald’s The Emigrants and last night I added A Notable Woman (which is Jean Lucey Pratt’s diary edited by Simon Garfield) to the list for December 2015.

The reason why they come out at this time of year?  Because it’s a cosy thing to look back and see what I was reading five and ten and twenty (and thirty) years ago.  Because it reminds me of books I once meant to read and might, now, in 2016.  And because once a year I sit in an armchair with a cup of tea and look back at my reading over the past twelve months and select the book which is to be the recipient of the ‘Diane Setterfield Read of the Year’ award.  There is no prize attached to it.  There is no glory.  The winner will not even know they have won.  It’s just a thing I like to do, in private.

This year the award will be decided on Boxing Day.  I am looking forward to it very much.  And some time in 2016 (in the summer months I reckon, unless I do more lengthy  commenting than usual) I will go shopping for a new reading diary to take me through the next decade or two.  It will be a sensible one, and not something that is going to fray and fall apart in no time.

Merry Christmas – and may you have a good deal of happy reading in the holidays!

There was a moment of great excitement in the Setterfield household at lunchtime today.  The postman rang at the door with this box:

And a few seconds later it was like this:

And – more prettily arranged, with the aid of my obliging houseplants – the contents are these:

Six new books.  Yes, six.  I don’t know what your purchasing habits are, but for me that is something of an event.  Ordinarily I am a drip-feeder where book buying is concerned.  I find it hard to pass a bookshop without going in, so I buy frequently, but usually come out with a single volume, at the most two.  There are benefits to this frugality.  I get to enjoy regular chats with the nice people at Daunts, as well as indulging my secret urge to eavesdrop on strangers talking about books. (I suppose that’s a secret no longer, now that I’ve told you.)  Once or twice a year though it is a huge treat to splurge.  And when you are used to books coming home in a bag over your arm, there is something utterly thrilling about having a whole box of them arrive at your door (thanks to the Guardian bookshop).

This is what I chose and why I chose it:

 A Notable Woman: the romantic journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited by Simon Garfield

The thing about other people’s diaries is, you’re not supposed to read them.  Which is why Simon Garfield is such a genius in finding these very private writings and making them available to spying snoops like me.  (Which sets me thinking, what is reading anyway if not legitimized snooping?  Hmm…  There’s a whole new blog there, I think.)   There is nothing like a diary for giving you a fine grain view of a person’s life, the inner and the outer, and I am expecting to love this one.  What is more, my sister and my Mum are in the queue to read it after me.

 40 Sonnets, Don Paterson

Lately I have been missing poetry in my reading.  I can’t remember how or why it fell out of my reading habits but I am deliberately making a space for it now and this volume is the start.  It is the only one of these six books I opened the moment I had it in my hands.  I read and reread the first sonnet – it is called Here – between taking the second and the third of the photos above.  The pleasures of poetry are many, but among them are the lightness of the volume in your hand, the generosity of white space around the lines, the fact that a slim volume like this is the first of my six new books to be started but will almost certainly be the last to be finished.  I will read Here again when I have finished this, and again before bed. Tomorrow I will read the next one: Wave.  And so on.  Fourteen lines, several times a day, for forty days.

 A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins

Jim Crace says this is: ‘heart-rending and heart-warming… for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel.’  By and large I am wary of endorsements unless I have a blood relationship with the person or have known them for a decade or more, but Jim Crace is, in my eyes, the author who can do no wrong.  If he likes this, it must be good.  I didn’t hesitate.  Also it’s a translation from German, and my fondness for translators and translation knows no bounds, so if I needed a second reason that is it.

 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child, by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

More translations.  These are volumes 3 and 4 of the Neapolitan Quartet that is selling like hot cakes all over the world.  I read volume 1 with my friend C in our two-member bookgroup (and blogged about that here), and read volume 2 after receiving it for my birthday.  In truth, this isn’t really my kind of book – I have never been able to generate much interest in fictional love affairs and there are love affairs aplenty here – but I am curious about the phenomenal reach of this series and a quartet that has female friendship at its heart is a rare thing, so I’m sticking with it.

 Slade House, David Mitchell

This is a ghost story.  Although if I’ve got the right end of the stick, it’s a ghost-story-that’s-not-exactly-a-ghost-story, which makes it even better.  Many of my favourite haunted books were written with one foot in the genre and the other somewhere else altogether.  Books that are easy to classify make life easy for booksellers and librarians, but for this reader nothing is better than a book which is neither quite one thing nor the other.  And Christmas is coming!  It wouldn’t be Christmas without something chilling to read.

So with this lovely box full of treats I am all set for a few weeks of winter reading.

One last thing: when I took them out of the box and saw the jackets together, I realized how much grey there was in my selection.  Is that the new fashion in book covers?  Paterson’s egg-yolk yellow is gorgeously vivid by contrast.

I have got a sore throat, a headache and a cough.  Intermittent sneezing too.  Brilliant!  I can loll on the sofa with Beverley Nichols.

Who?

Most people under the age of sixty have never heard of Beverley Nichols.  In fact many people over sixty haven’t heard of him either, unless they are British and gardeners.

I discovered him over a decade ago in the brilliant bookshop attached to Harrogate’s famous Harlow Carr gardens.  As a novice gardener, I was feeling a bit intimidated by the big books full of dauntingly expert advice, when I came across something that looked reassuringly smaller.

‘Down the Garden Path’ was an old-fashioned, pinky-brown hardback illustrated with some rather sweet drawings by Rex Whistler.

The publisher was Timber Press, a company I’d never heard of.  I opened it at random, read a few paragraphs and quickly realised that it wasn’t a gardening manual at all but something else altogether.  It confused me.  It bemused me.  And then it made me laugh.

The book I purchased that day was a proper gardening book that tells you how and when and where to plant things so they will grow.  But I didn’t forget the little brown book.  Every time I went back to Harlow Carr to buy plants, I would nip into the bookshop and steal a few more minutes with Beverley.  I never once thought of buying it: it was far too silly for that.  Any practical gardening tips were so buried in purple prose, sentiment and overblown drama that they were as good as useless.  On the other hand, I couldn’t quite stay away.  Any excuse to walk through the woods and up to the gardens for a few minutes loitering between the bookshelves, giggling with Mr Nichols.

So things remained – till I got the flu.

‘What can I bring you?’ said a kindly visiting friend.  She meant paracetamol I expect, or grapes.

‘Beverley Nichols,’ I spluttered and she was as good as her word.

I now have all eight Beverley Nichols books reproduced in facsimile by Timber Press.

(Timber Press, I have learnt, is an American publisher that specialises in proper books for real gardeners.  They have titles like ‘Planting in a post-wild world: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes’ so clearly they are serious minded people.  Yet they too have been won over by Mr Nichols own brand of silliness.)

When we moved a year ago to this little flat and most of my books went into storage, G didn’t understand why Beverley Nichols was in the pile to keep.  ‘We haven’t got a garden,’ he pointed out.

‘No,’ I said.  ‘But I’m bound to get a cold.’

Can you think of a better room to feel poorly in than this one?

In the last decade I have coughed through the Merry Hall trilogy and then sneezed through the Allways books.  The books – novels? memoirs? loosely linked anecdotes? – are only superficially about gardening.  They portray a dottily fanciful mid C20th vision of Englishness, one that includes daggers at dawn dramas provoked by village hall flower displays and far more kittens than most readers can stomach.  I occasionally lend them to friends, hoping to find a sister soul out there to share my sickbed passion with.  People return them with expressions of bewilderment or appalled horror.  ‘But Diane!’ they say.  ‘It’s so twee!’  Well, yes.  And whimsical and frothy and insubstantial and sentimental and melodramatic.  It has nothing to recommend it to the serious reader, nothing at all.  But when I am unwell, there’s nobody I would sooner have nursing me than Mr Nichols.  Even now, when I have coughed so much it hurts to laugh.

My first book group had five firm reading members plus one occasional. We were a tight-knit bunch who’d known each other for several years already. My present London book group couldn’t be more different. It’s hard to tell how many of us there are. Usually there are six or seven at a meeting, but never the same ones two sessions in a row. The mailing list for the group is large but people drop in and out. Some members have been friends for decades. Others (including me) are newcomers. Because it’s a porous group from time to time someone tags along who isn’t a member at all, just someone’s friend or visiting relative or temporary lodger. They get added to the mailing list, which grows longer and longer.

Does it matter how many members a book group has? In recent weeks I have co-founded two new book groups both of which have two members. Is that enough? Can two readers be a book group? How many is a group anyway? The Concise Oxford Dictionary is not terribly helpful: a group, it says, is: ‘a number of people or things’. Well, two is definitely a number but so, surely, is one, and when I read alone I am quite certain that I am not a book group. An online dictionary offers more precision: ‘two or more’ it states. If that is accurate then technically at least my two-member reading clubs qualify for the term book group – yet it still doesn’t quite feel right. In standard usage the word ‘group’ conjures up trios, quadruples, quintuples and larger statistical aggregates. Should my reading friends and I think of ourselves as book pairs? Reading duos?

J and I have been talking about books and art for over thirty years now, ever since we met in our first term at university. My reading diary – which I began at 18 and in which I record every book I read – is inspired by the one she started keeping at the age of 10. (It is one of the enduring sorrows of my life that she has this eight year head start on me. Our friendship has flourished despite this diary envy.) Over the years we have agreed and disagreed about books, read and not read titles recommended by the other. Our reading lives have looped around each other, interlinked then gone in opposite directions only to come back and share what we’d discovered. She brought me back to Trollope when I’d got off on the wrong foot with him, and he’s a great favourite of mine now. When I was hooked on the joy of novelty, demanding a constant supply of new books, her’s was the quiet, persistent voice that told me how much fun she was having rereading Jane Austen. There is a huge overlap in what we have read, but often we read the same book after a lapse of many years. We have conversations where one of us says, ‘I read that book you told me about. Don’t you think the ending was a bit strange?’ and the other says, ‘Can’t remember. Wasn’t it 1992 when I read it?’ One day we were talking about Leonora Carrington, the runaway aristocrat and surrealist painter, friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, whose work we both liked. ‘Didn’t she write a novel?’ one of us wondered. We googled. She did! And one of us said, ‘Let’s read it. At the same time. Now.’ And we did.

And that was that. Not only did we discover the delights of The Hearing Trumpet with its new introduction by Ali Smith, but we also experienced the pleasure of a book group with only two members. We talked faster, we talked more, we argued more furiously (old friends can), interrupted without causing offence and used that kind of verbal shorthand that people develop over the decades. It was very satisfying – and our next read is going to be:

I have another great friend, C. She lives in another city and we see each other only about twice a year, which is daft because it’s really not that far and twice a year is nowhere near enough. We are always saying we must meet more often, and we both mean it, and then we’re busy so we fail to arrange it. We needed some kind of a prompt. A reason to meet. This was it:

During the reading period we were cautious about how much we said on the phone. ‘Where are you up to?’ we constantly asked. ‘I’m a bit ahead,’ one might say tantalisingly, and the other honed in on the tone of voice to see whether it contained a clue about what might be coming next. Our conversations were deliberately short and tangential. We skirted around the book, touched on themes and characters only to draw back, made deliberately vague allusions to things we were going to say outright eventually…. We were conscious of keeping the substance of our thoughts private until the day. For I had bought a train ticket and we were going to meet. The day came. We began in a café, moved to a restaurant then to a tea room, talking non-stop. We talked about the book, our working lives, the book, our family lives, the book, how we have changed in all the years we’ve known each other, the book, our children and neblings*, the book, our parents, other books, the book… It ended up being an eight-hour book group meeting in which ‘My Brilliant Friend’ was mentioned in every hour alongside a dozen other topics. It wove in and out of our conversation, led us towards other topics, disappeared and reemerged, time and time again. There were three of us present that day: C, myself and the book. Life and reading and friendship all part of the same fabric.

C and I have decided to sidestep the ‘how many people does it take to make a book group’ question. Instead of saying ‘Bookgroup’ our reading related emails now have the subject line: ‘Brilliant Friends’ after our inaugural read. By extension, I suppose J and I could call ourselves, ‘The Hearing Trumpets’. I can see how that might seem odd to other people, but so what? The thing about a group with only two members is that there are no other people. There is only us – and we know exactly what we mean.

* Neblings: a neologism modelled on ‘siblings’ meaning nephews and nieces.

I’ve been in Bologna for a few days.  It’s the first time I’ve been to Italy for a holiday and it’s glorious to have a few days to roam and explore.  The museums here are wonderful: havens of cool air and tranquil discovery.  In the Science Museum we came across a handsome library with this formidable looking library ladder leading to knowledge and the dazzling light beyond.

I can’t help but approve.  Anyone with a library ladder like that is serious about books.

At the Pinacoteca Nazionale I was moved by the lovely colour and decoration of the religious books in the fifteenth century religious paintings.  They don’t seem to mind you getting your camera out here, so I took some pictures (without flash) to share with you:

Aren’t they gorgeous?  Both painter and binder have gone to great lengths to display these religious texts as the prized objects they are.

There were some puzzling examples.  Here is what appears to be a burning book in the hands of St Anthony…

…only I don’t think it can be.  From what I have been able to discover on a quick hunt, Anthony was renowned for his learning and often portrayed in a glorious illumination.  Might these ‘flames’ be the illumination of knowledge?  Hmmm.

And here’s another odd one, Girolamo.   What on earth is it that he is carrying on his book?

Girolamo apparently DID burn books when he didn’t approve of them.  Ovid, Boccaccio, Dante were all destroyed in his bonfire of the vanities.  He got his come uppance later when he was excommunicated for being too extreme, but that was afterwards: this was painted during his lifetime.  None of which explains the small mammal perched on his bible…

Perhaps these books have whetted your appetite?  If so, and if you are a fluent latin reader, here’s an open book so you can have a read:

I love the way the shadow falls where the pages are stitched in.

And here’s something else of interest only to committed bibliophiles.  Look at the way they shelved their books:

 


I hope the lion in the study didn’t distract you from noticing that the books are shelved on their sides.  (Though it’s nice to see that cats and books were considered a desirable combination 650 years ago too.)   I suppose that the bindings were of soft leather, and the pages wouldn’t have been protected adequately if the books had been shelved standing as we do.  The man who would know about this for sure is Alberto Manguel.  His book The History of Reading is a great favourite of mine but I haven’t read it for some years and it’s in storage – oh woe! – but if you can get a copy  you’ll find that he really knows his stuff.  I was going through a period of being a bit reluctant to read non-fiction when his book first came into my hands, but his account of the relationship between readers and their books over the ages is so fascinating that I just gobbled it up.  Now all these paintings make me want to read it again.

Just two more pictures to finish.  Here’s the infant Jesus, having been put down for his afternoon nap, elbow nonchalantly resting on a book:

Finally, my favourite picture from the whole museum.  It doesn’t have a book in it at all, but for some reason it stole my heart – perhaps because it reminds me of Stanley Spencer, a twentieth century British artist I love.  In any case, it has another ladder, which brings us full circle.

For the last month or so I have been working in a new place, away from home.  A friend’s mother, knowing I was struggling to find the space to live and write in my small flat, very generously offered me a room in her house, so four times a week I cross the park to a pretty white house and climb the stairs to what was once the bedroom of her eldest child.  There I write.  It is a very nice arrangement and working well.

There are books in the room.  Other people’s books are utterly fascinating to me.  Often it’s because you learn a lot about a person by knowing what they read.  In some cases – as now – there is the pleasure of noticing that someone has read the same sorts of books that you have read.  This, you think, is a person I would like.  But there’s also something odd about it.   Seeing a familiar book on someone else’s shelf fills me with the urgent desire to reread it.  Why should that be, when the same book has sat quietly on my own shelf for several decades, pretty much ignored?

The eldest daughter of the white house across the park read D H Lawrence and Dostoevsky in her teens, as I did.  Like me, she enjoyed Daphne du Maurier.  E M Forster is here, and Henry James and Elizabeth Jane Howard.  I know them all.  I have them all.   It is peculiar that the power these books exert over me should be greater than that of my own copies.

Is it simply that the books are trying to distract me from work?  After all, the reading life is always in competition with the writing life – and it fights dirty.  But I don’t think it can be so simple.  After all, Lawrence sat on my shelf for years while I was a few feet away writing The Thirteenth Tale and Bellman & Black and he was as quiet as a mouse then.

If it was a different edition I could understand a book catching the eye and sparking a desire for reacquaintance.  A new jacket can freshen up any author.  But the previous inhabitant of this room is about my age, so these are the very same Penguin paperbacks I already have.  It must be something else.

Perhaps it is less about the books themselves and more to do with the fact that they belong to a stranger.  These books look like my books, but they are not my books.  They have been read – reread maybe – by someone else, a person I know little of.   Another’s hand has turned these pages, another’s eye scanned these words and lines and paragraphs.  This matters because it is the reader that makes the book.  An unread book is full of potential, but it is only half a thing; without a reader to complete it, it is inert.  Only a reader can bring a book to life, and every reader brings something fresh and unique to the reading. The owner of this copy will have noticed things about Mrs Morel that passed me by.  She will have evaluated Paul’s nature differently from me and therefore judged him differently.  Some thirty or more years after first reading it, what she remembers will not be what I remember.  This copy of Sons and Lovers – in every measurable aspect identical to my own – has revealed to its owner a face I have never seen.   What is more, this copy reminds me tantalizingly of all the books that Sons and Lovers is capable of being, beyond hers and mine.

One day I will reread Sons and Lovers.  Inevitably I will read it personally, with reference to my own values, experiences (of life and other books) and preferences.  At the same time I will try to open my third eye, to catch a glimpse of what it is that a thousand other readers might see in those same pages.   It is a useful practice for a writer.  Those ‘thousand other readers’ are the ones whose responses I must tune into with every sentence I write.