Scribbles in the Margins Read online

  There is sometimes a note, begging lodgers to ‘Please, take anything you like’, or issuing rules such as ‘Take one and leave another’, or barking instructions to ‘Ensure All Books Are Replaced At The End Of Your Stay. Thank You. Hotel Management’. The books are left alone in no particular order and with no discernible themes beyond ‘Unwanted’. Somehow, this array offers a reading possibility for all holidaymakers, as denoted by the staple contents of such libraries: autobiographies of stand-up comedians, sportspeople and chat-show presenters; regional tour guides and maps; one Harry Potter volume; a later edition Peter Rabbit or other wholesome children’s title; a thesaurus; a Ken Hom or Gordon Ramsay recipe album; a Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson travel book about somewhere else entirely; a National Geographic photography annual; and any number of works by Maeve Binchy, Frederick Forsyth, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, Harold Robbins, Stieg Larsson and Dean Koontz.

  The oddity, and the deepest delight, is that somehow these books become far more attractive than whatever carefully curated choices you might have packed. They feel like bonus books; the fiver found on the pavement is far lovelier than the tenner in your wallet. The reading of one is a brief encounter. It must be devoured to the full before your stay is complete. Then, the holiday romance ends, and you return to your homely, predictable collection.

  44

  Squeezing a book onto the shelf

  You will never have too many books. It is impossible. Even if there is a pile in the bathroom, and some have been relegated to cardboard boxes in the loft or garage, it is still impossible. Blame your home for not having enough space, but never the books for taking up too much of it. Besides, no human ever walked into a house, flat or apartment dominated by spines and pages and found it to be soulless. Nor will this particular furnishing ever go out of fashion and be torn out or stripped back. Charity collection bags and decluttering are the enemy.

  The nurture of a breathing, expanding book collection is no mean feat. At first, shelves are conventionally stacked with spines facing outwards and books in a static queue. They are simple to order, and titles easily found. As books breed, however, such cases begin to bloat. New purchases become refugees, living on the margins. They are rested horizontally across the crowns of older titles or in the small space in front of them, between book and shelf edge so that they partially peer over the edge of the cliff. Some may even be doubled up, stacked vertically so as to obscure original works, like a fresh lick of paint. In between the moment when any space on the dusty top of a bookcase has been used and a decision to begin annexing other areas of the home, there is one last resort: the squeezing in of new additions.

  Once a suitable area has been identified for that addition – and it is possibly a narrow choice of berth due to an alphabetical system – a structural assessment is needed. This involves the placing of your palm on top of five or six books and the application of a shaking motion. If there is the tiniest bit of ‘give’, and your book is not War and Peace, then the squeeze is on. Prising open a gap with forefinger and thumb and then somehow holding back the tide, it becomes possible to wedge in the new arrival so that it has a foot in the door. Then, one hand is needed for further clawing against gravity to hold back whichever row, left or right, is pushing most forcibly. With the other hand, the incomer is jostled, shoved and rammed into place until just about comfortable. Any room for manoeuvre, your fingertips find upon renewed acquaintance with the book tops, has gone. This is a taut shelf. Forget reading anything from it until time and sunlight have aged loose these books’ skins.

  Were they to watch this caper, a book conservationist or dedicated collector would shudder. There is profound pleasure, then, in this minor act of rebellion, and in the way it allows you to refute the laws of physics. It carries the satisfaction of a job well done, DIY for the bibliophile. Any mark that is left on the squeezed book’s cover, or slight limp it may possess should it try to walk, is another etching that weds you to it. This cramming-in is a display of affection – you are determined to find a home for this book, and help it settle in with others. Best of all, it creates space to grow the flock.

  45

  Choosing and anticipating holiday reading

  First, wheels or wings take you elsewhere, and then words do. Travels heaped upon travels. To pour through pages on holiday, if the right choices are made, somehow makes the reading experience thicker, the book’s impact greater. In heat especially, words seem to enter your bloodstream.

  Perhaps this happens because reading time is ring-fenced, and distractions plucked away one by one with each mile travelled (less so, admittedly, if you remember to pack your children). It means that the holiday book seems to have elevated status over others, and that there is extra pressure on its pages. It must perform. Though evocative and heavenly it may be, there is weight in the very phrase ‘holiday reading’. Beneath the veneer of contentment lurks a matter of utmost gravity. Your books represent a secondary destination, and a useful way of avoiding eye-contact with fellow holidaymakers. I have seen off Clives from Dunstable with well-turned novels and Steves from Leicester with poignant biographies. Books are shields.

  The selections you make are, consequently, vital. Classically, holiday reading conjures fat thrilling paperbacks with supple spines, physically suitable for the contortions of sunbed and beach towel, and mentally so for a jaded brain shirking difficult thought. These titles must not be dismissed as ‘trashy novels’; a holiday read in particular should fit the needs and tastes of its reader, the highest of which are happiness and release from everyday strife. Accordingly, burdensome tomes on American presidents or vicious battles are unfurled on holiday too. Some readers match destination to travel book, enriching their experience of a place. Reading in situ helps bind them to location, cultivating texture, context and a pleasing, borderline-smug veneer of regional knowledge. It means the reader has doubled-up – they are physically and psychologically immersed elsewhere, heightening the sense of diversion a holiday should offer.

  These choices are gathered over weeks and months prior to departure. Books are ‘saved’ for holiday reading like an old terraced house’s front room reserved for visitors, policemen or Sunday best. A holiday stash sits aloof from regular reading, which looks on, landlocked. The stash is usually wildly over-ambitious, and in many cases neglects entirely that other holiday activities such as talking to partners, daytrips and parenting will have to be undertaken. Still, when packing-time dawns, it is worth removing at least half a dozen essential items of clothing to squash into the suitcase as many books as is possible just in case.

  A holiday’s nascent hours present a chance to set the tone, to find reading places and begin filling whole days with tales from elsewhere. Those sunbeds and beach towels are portals if you can twist yourself comfortable, that cottage window-seat a chariot once you find the right angle. If a book performs its duty of absorption, all opportunities to read are snaffled – waiting for a partner to get ready or for a meal to arrive at the table, or a stolen half-hour on an apartment balcony in the heavy silence of some foreign midnight before a one-sheet bed beckons. Reading splashes itself across the holiday, becoming to your senses as integral as fresh bread and cool beer, and to your soul as vital as not being in an office.

  The days roll and the date turns. Remaining time is frequently totted up, an act of self-reassurance that there is life yet in this halcyon vacation, that return flights, luggage carousels, junk mail and bad bread are still a world away: still a week to go, still four days then three, still not home until this time tomorrow, still three hours left . . . Books are forlornly repacked, the great unread among them, their pointless adventure nearly over. To look again at those you did achieve, though, is to be repaid and transported to Greece or that bewitching villa for a further fleeting second each time you glimpse their spines in passing. It can provoke a richer, more intense feeling than a photograph, such does holiday reading burrow beneath our skins.

  46

  Lett
ing poetry tingle your spine

  The right lines in the right place at the right time. You could have read or heard them a thousand times over, or they may drift right through you as fresh as a spring breeze. Some poetry fixes you in its stare and invades the soul while it does so.

  A poem is swallowed much more slowly than prose, as if read by the letter rather than the word. There is a need to wring a favourite verse so it, in turn, contorts the reader’s insides. In one line can it grip the heart, twist the stomach and yank the tonsils. The right poem is a visceral, shuddering experience, a marked joy that sparks goosebumps the size of arrowheads, and tickles the spine with static electricity, especially if read alone and aloud.

  It should be left to run without interference. Analysing the poem, dissecting it in a needless autopsy, foists science, with its ration and rules, upon a mercurial firework. It claims truths where there are none. Poetry is unquantifiable, which is why one reader’s W. H. Auden is another’s John Cooper Clarke. You jump upon a poem and it piggybacks you to a place of heightened senses and piercing emotions. When the last line is swallowed there is a blissful gap while you fall back to earth. For thirty seconds, you are altered, not fit for other humans and content to be that way.

  A poem is yours, and cannot be experienced by anyone else quite precisely as it is by you.

  47

  Remembering a book from childhood

  In a furniture superstore, an overheard mother warns her child to stop swinging on a wardrobe, lest he ‘end up like Flat Stanley’. You haven’t thought of him, of that book, in twenty or more years. Immediately, you can picture its cover – the eponymous hero emerging from a musty yellow envelope dressed in a shirt and tie, in front of a wallpaper-pattern background reminiscent of a beehive. You recall how the story gave you a sense of abject fear (clearly, what happened to a little boy like Stanley Lambchop could happen to a little child like you) and of acute jealousy (how you wished that, like Stanley Lambchop, you could slide beneath doors and be a kite). You cannot remember when or where it was read to you, or if you did the reading, but the object itself and its story were woven within, obscured until now but most definitely there. While the furniture surrounding you when coming to know this story has slipped from your mind, the book’s furniture has stayed. How remarkable and profound that the slightest of brushes against a memory should plunder such rich returns.

  Childhood books that dwell within us are dormant and can be snapped awake by fleeting references, most joyfully in a communal setting. In a café, a book about dragons and knights is mentioned, and within minutes its perky cherry cover and the violent spikes which pierce the Lambton Worm’s flesh are discussed. ‘A dark, dark house’ is mentioned in the workplace, and soon skeletons dancing through the night and a book jacket with butter-yellow edges are spreading warm recollections, spreadsheets abandoned. Illustrated heroes and villains lurk inside every head.

  Then comes a hallowed day when a childhood book crosses from memory into possession. It may be in times sad, happy or neither; the clearing of a childhood home, the choice of the young reader you are raising, or a routine afternoon in a bookshop. When held, a silent charge pulses through the book and shrinks you backwards in time. Everything is familiar and reassuring – the feel, the cover, the drawings, the chins of the villagers, the deep-thinking cat, the peril and the end.

  In the most jubilant instance this is the same copy first read, when gods and monsters first snuck into some beguiled corner of your mind. ‘This Book Belongs to . . .’ reads its label, and the answer is ‘you’, both then and now.

  48

  Getting waylaid looking at a dictionary

  ‘I know you can be “incredulous”, but can you be “credulous”? Let’s see.’

  Oh no, too far in: F. ‘Fungo’. What a lovely word. A fungo is, apparently, ‘(in baseball) a ball struck high into the air for fielders to practise catching’.

  You’ve already forgotten it though, because a few lines down ‘Funicle’ is winking at you. And look, ‘Furfur’! ‘Dandruff or scurf.’ But what’s ‘scurf’? No, must carry on. Credulous . . . credulous. Skip the E pages, here are the Ds. Credulous . . . cre—

  ‘Dowf ’! ‘Dull, heavy, spiritless.’ Dowf ! You really need to use that. And ‘Dottle’! ‘A plug of tobacco left in the bottom of a pipe.’ Come on, skip the Ds, back to the Cs. Credulous . . .

  ‘Daggle’! You want that word in your life. Daggle: ‘to wet or grow wet by dragging or sprinkling.’ Here you are, the C pages, nearly there now. Cy- . . . Cu- . . . A ‘cupid’ is a type of jam tart? ‘Cummerbund’ is a Hindi word? A ‘cuddy’ can be a small cabin, rent, a donkey, a stupid person or a young coalfish. What a wonderful world.

  On you go, though. Credulous . . . Must be soon. Cry- . . . Cru- . . . ‘Crunk’ is a ‘state of excitement’ but ‘crunkle’ is ‘to crumple’. Ha.

  Nearly there. Cri- . . . Cre-. You made it. ‘Creep, creel, creek, creed, cree, credulousness, credulously . . .

  CREDULOUS. Credulous: ‘apt to believe without sufficient evidence.’ So you can be credulous. Oh, isn’t ‘credo’ a . . . you’re not sure quite how to describe it – a ‘satisfying’ word? You’ll just check . . .

  On it goes. A dictionary could always be your desert island book and your prison-cell must. It is an endless pursuit through which time can be squandered until a ship approaches, a sentence is served, or the maker is met. Words and meanings and origins and plurals and 64 red-striped centre pages of miscellany.

  Little of the information consumed is retained, but that in itself is endearing: this wanton display of linguistic anorak behaviour has no real purpose other than momentary joy. To become wilfully lost like this is to abandon yourself to the building blocks of all your favourite books.

  49

  Feeling a book is intimately for you

  Each book you read becomes an acquaintance. Some you look forward to seeing again, some you hide around a corner from. There are one-way friendships in which you put in all the work, and half-strangers with whom you never get beyond nodding terms – enigmatic stories that are difficult to judge. Many become frequent visitors, resting in rooms you own and occasionally being entertaining or upsetting. Then, perhaps only once a year or less, a book becomes an intimate friend.

  This goes beyond simple adoration. That is certainly felt, but standing on its shoulders is a heightened level of immersion in the story. With these paragon works, you do not merely admire at arm’s length: you wish to jump inside its pages. Every leaf is tickled with a detail or notion or general way of being that makes you think this was written for me.

  This sensation can bloom when a book seems familiar, as though you are its preordained recipient. Topics, references, locations, and humour do not get under your skin, because they are already there. Here is the very embodiment of something you presently feel. A novel’s characters are people, or versions of them, you have met. Each paragraph elicits empathy, each chapter ends with a knowing sigh.

  Or sometimes a book can ambush you. The story may dance around remote lives and times that can never be known, but it whispers intently in your direction. It feels as though only you can truly hear its voice. As the working day forges onwards you and this title are in another dimension, awaiting the moment when you can be alone together. It is as if this book has been sent to you from some cosmic Neverland that exists to marry page and person.

  Halfway through the book, it becomes inconceivable to consider that it could possibly have been written for anyone else. So tight is its grip that all reason evaporates. There may as well be a dedication to you at the start. No one can know or love this story quite so ferociously.

  50

  Finishing a book, putting it down, and thinking about it

  Evening has drawn in on the book. The last lines ebb away, and then there is nothing. You look beyond The End, shifting through the plumage of any remaining pages. Endorsements for further works by this newly cherished author offer comfort, and an A
cknowledgements page is clocked and will later make for an encore.

  Now you dip backwards, rewinding time with a finger placed into the roulette wheels of its pages so you can pause, read a line and remember, or be reminded. With its front cover once again mulled over, the book is clapped closed and placed ceremonially on a nearby surface to lie in state. Should you be in bed, there is little chance of sleep visiting soon. Completing a book summons all-consuming thoughts of the tale now ended. They lodge in your mind like a prolonged and pealing echo.

  After a while broad reflections thin to particulars. Wasn’t that flawed, leading man likeable? Didn’t that hospital scene strike you hard and draw tears from your eyes? The narrator’s way of talking to you lingers, its prose-style, rhythms and beats still tangible. Perhaps you may even wonder what happened next to its characters.

  The book’s narrative overlaps with your own. There is a routine sense of emptiness and loss to flounder in during this brief gap between reads. Lurking is the danger that reality will poke through.

  It won’t. There is always another book to escape in.

  Acknowledgements

  For her love, encouragement and only occasionally complaining about the amount of books I buy, Marisa; for letting me do the voices, Kaitlyn; for wisdom and persistent support, Mark Stanton of Jenny Brown Associates; for faith in my words and always improving them, Charlotte Atyeo at Bloomsbury; for support and seeing another one over the line, Holly Jarrald at Bloomsbury.

  And another tip of the flat-cap to three great Yorkshire folk: Mum, Dad and J. B. Priestley.

  Bloomsbury Publishing