Reading for fun and profit
17th March 2016
It may sound like a strange thing to say, but working in publishing has lessened my love of books and reading for pleasure not a jot.
Even though I spend all my working day reading, I also spend a good deal of my free time reading too. I feel naked without a book; there’s always one in my pocket or in my bag, and one of the first things I pack when we’re going on holiday is reading material.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of reading – spending one blazing hot summer sitting on the flat roof of our porch reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, reading MR. James and Shirley Jackson by candlelight on winter nights (yes, I was that pretentious teen: think joss sticks, skull rings, heavy metal patches on the denim jacket, the works).
Ali, my wife, once said to me, “Books are like oxygen to you.” I always have a stack of the next three books to read by the bedside, and when I finish a book I love getting to add one more to the stack from the shelves and piles that crowd our house. One thing my Dad would never deny buying us if requested was a book; it was the treat he was always happy to give. When he described his job as a theologian as “basically being paid to read books”, I knew too that that was what I wanted to do – the best job in the world.
It’s not just what’s in the books, though, it’s the objects themselves. I’m not an obsessive collector of pristine hardbacks or first editions, but I am an obsessive book hoarder. True, I’m getting better at passing on books I know I will never read again, but as soon as one goes out the door, five more come in. And then there’s the smell of books – second hand books have a lovely cinnamon musk, their aged golden pages giving up their spice over time. New books have a fresh smell, there’s something promising, almost urgent about them. Hay on Wye is one of my favourite places on earth – not only for the breadth of books on offer in that beautiful town, but for those caverns of titles, exuding their heady scent.
One of the joys of being a parent is that I can now pass on that love to our daughters. The youngest, Lily, is a bit too young for anything beyond Where’s Baby? or The Hungry Caterpillar right now, but Maia, at five years old is getting to be the perfect age for bigger stories. We’ve loved the works of writers and artists such as Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler together, but now I’m getting to read Maia the Narnia novels, and it’s a real joy when you have her absolute attention and you’re sharing a world of imagination and wonder with her.
And because she’s enjoying the Narnia books, there’s other books I think we’ll enjoy together, and those will lead to yet more books, and so on. Reading books is a love that I hope never leaves our girls and stays with them for life, just as it has for their parents.