The start of a journey
Looking forward to rediscovering my books
Tomorrow is Plough Monday, the first working day after Epiphany and traditionally the day that agricultural labourers returned to work following their protracted Christmas celebrations. I mentioned to someone on Twitter/X the other day that I love January for being all about snowdrop-spotting and gleaming jars of marmalade. (There are boxes of Seville oranges in the village shop.) Throughout my life, it’s been the period when I’ve looked forward to the chances of true winter weather, of frosts, ice and snow — although these days my adult eyes glance with considerably less enthusiasm towards the prospect of drifts and power cuts that my childhood self could regard with equanimity, and particularly those of one well-remembered winter when we bumped our little sledge across the snowbound fields to fetch provisions to be heated on a single-pan camping stove.
Then, when I was five, the world went white too.
Mother pulled the bedroom curtains back one morning on a strange half-light and silence pressed like a padded mattress against the house. We stared at the white, shivering, then flew frantic, caged, from room to room, trying every casement latch and handle.
All our windows and both our doors: sealed shut by snow.
We ran next to the taps and switches.
No power.
No water in the kitchen.
No phone to call for help.
Tanya Shadrick, The Cure For Sleep
The wild, wet storms that have ravaged Britain over the last few weeks have not felt like true winter storms. They were violent renegades on the run from November, or Masefield’s ‘mad March days,’ with no rightful place at the standing-still of the year. Now, a cold spell is in the offing. This morning I woke to almost clear skies, a waning, rocking-chair moon, and a film of ice on the bird bath. I found myself taking the measure of our stack of firewood, depleted over Christmas, and calculating how soon I can fetch more logs from the little farm among the zig-zag lanes.
But the long month between Twelfth Night and Candlemas always feels freighted with much more than this. Although I have never succumbed to the tyranny of New Year’s Resolutions, and although the arable fields around us were all tilled and sown last autumn, the arrival of Plough Monday lends an inevitable sense of new beginnings, of breaking new ground figuratively as well as literally. And 2024, I have decided, will be a year in which I buy no more books. More importantly, it will be a year for rediscovering the books I own.
Why am I doing this? It’s impossible to deny that my library has grown out of hand, and certainly beyond the capacity of my shelves — a situation that I find as daunting as it is glorious (and vice versa). Coming across an unread book that I had no recollection of owning was the catalyst. I cast my mind back to Susan Hill’s Howards End Is On The Landing and decided it was time to embark on my own ‘year of reading from home’.
It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.
I pursued the elusive book though several rooms and did not find it in any of them, but each time I did find at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred, that I had never read.
And then I picked out a book I had read but had forgotten I owned. And another and another. After that came the books I had read, knew I owned and realised that I wanted to read again.
I found the book I was looking for in the end, but by then it had become far more than a book. It marked the start of a journey through my own library.
Susan Hill, Howards End Is On The Landing
Romantically, I found myself looking forward to a year of similar discoveries. Practically, still dragged backwards by Long Covid, I knew that I needed to be even more gentle with myself; even more reasonable in my expectations; even more unhurried. Prosaically, I was attracted to the idea of saving money, too. But then other thoughts and feelings started to spring up, gradually becoming as profuse as the bright green shoots of winter wheat beyond our windows. I began to twitch uncomfortably under the knowledge that too many people do not enjoy the privilege of buying a book simply because it catches their eye; too many children have no access to books in the home at all; and (yet again in our bitterly repetitive history) too many families have seen all that they own consumed by the ever-expanding concentric circles of ideology, terror and war. Already in possession of more than enough books to see me through this year (and the next, and the one after that), adding to them at this time suddenly felt wrong. In contrast, a pared-back habit, in deference to all that’s happening on both a personal and a global scale, feels right.
There will be some new books entering my home this year — both Sleepless by Annabel Abbs and Rural Hours by Harriet Baker were pre-ordered late in 2023, and at least one of the longstanding pledges I’ve made at Unbound is due for publication in 2024. I’ve already started a ‘wish list’ of titles that I’m seeing recommended now, an aide memoire which I know will be extensive by year’s end and require the most careful winnowing if I am ever to make sense of it. Unlike Hill, I will not be retreating from social media. My plan is to write about the books I’m reading, or re-reading, or deciding are no longer what I want to read at all, and I’m looking forward to sharing my responses to them with my frankly astonishing number of subscribers. But I am also looking forward to a year without bustle or jangle, without the pressure of Thursday temptations or the insidious fear of missing out.
No need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
This is my personal furrow. It is not intended as virtue signalling, carries no judgements, and certainly places no onus on anyone else. A new but already dear friend has called it living life in a quiet key, and I like that way of expressing it very much indeed.
In case you missed it in my Notes, the first book I read this year was Swiss author Urs Faes’s slender novella, Twelve Nights, translated from the German by Jamie Lee Searle.
A host of evil spirits move through the high valleys of the Black Forest in the period between Christmas and Epiphany. Believers blame them for every piece of ill luck, or ward them off in those days between with incense, sachets of herbs and bones, and the flame of the Yule log. For Manfred, returning to the valley of his birth after forty years’ absence, those folk demons have become entangled with memories of the feud of possession and possessiveness that drove him away: a conflict over love and land with his brother, Sebastian, which culminated in an act of unspeakable cruelty. As his tentative approach reanimates the closeness Manfred once felt to the landscape and its traditions, the book weaves an increasingly vivid arras of plant names, place names and personal hurts, behind which both snow and regrets accumulate ever more deeply. Will Epiphany bring Manfred the revelation he craves?
… an hour’s walk, perhaps, even if he took his time and stopped now and again to gaze at the valley’s undulating landscape, its green-black pines huddled close and silent, making the day into night and the murmur of the tree tops into an evensong.
Urs Faes, Twelve Nights
Ensorcelled, I read Twelve Nights in less than an afternoon. It was an ideal coda to the festive season.
P.S. My accompanying photograph was taken last year. I know not to bring snowdrops into the house until Candlemas.
© The Unhurried Reader 2024
This has resonated with me so much, I started my Bookstagram account with the intent to read what was on my shelves; it is called Travels Along My Bookshelf. It did not come to fruition and I succumbed to the call of new books. I like you want to engage with the books I already own, although I am committed to new books coming from publishers already, it is my aim to try to reduce that and to read books I already own.
I bought very few books last year (a necessary budget-adjustment) and read mostly from the library. I, too, have far too many unread books and decided that between the library and reading from my shelves I would be wonderfully entertained. And I was! It also made the books I received as Christmas gifts all the more precious -- which felt like it used to feel when I was a kid and Christmas and birthdays were the only times I got new books. I plan to keep up the no-buy and work my way through my shelves...for the unread and the re-reads (though I did get two gift cards which I've already redeemed for three books which have been on my wishlist for ages but I don't think that counts :))