How well do I know my own bookshelf? Well… it’s a million dollar question many booklovers never ask themselves. You go in a bookstore or visit a Sunday market of used books or you browse the website of an online bookseller and immediately you become a child in a candy store. So many wonderful books are there to allure you- latest fiction and non-fiction on the bestseller lists, a controversial biography which has excited a fierce debate, an invitation to pre-order a magnum opus of some ‘legendary writer of our time’ (at a heavily discounted rate) and then there are reissued editions of classics you always wanted to read and have on your shelf, invitations to join a book club and receive some books free, recommendations by friends and fellow academicians (if you belong to that tribe) and so on ….the list can be endless. So many temptations which are almost impossible to resist…each book seeming to be a ‘must have’. Your wishlist goes on swelling and so does your bookshelf. But have you ever had time to take a breath and think: ‘How many of these have I actually read?’ Then some day while searching for some required title or while moving your shelf to some other place or while cleaning the shelf, you suddenly discover that your own bookshelves have become unfamiliar to you and that many of the titles you enthusiastically and resolutely and (sometimes) greedily bought have been rusting. Many quite winter evenings or summer afternoons or rainy days which could have been spent romancing with those must reads have actually been spent (or often wasted) surfing the internet, following links after links and ending up at a place where you probably never intended to go or in silly parties, rubbish gossips, watching stupid daily soaps or (fake) reality shows and all.

All these thoughts came rushing to my mind and I am feeling sort of being woken up and reminded of the treasure I possess while I was looking for some distant El Dorado. Surprisingly, this has happened while surfing the internet where I happened to read by chance, an article about Susan Hill’s latest book: ‘Howards End is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home’. This book was released yesterday (15^th October 2009). It tells the story of one year that the author (Susan Hill) spent reading the books she already had and wanted to read but could not due to reasons like the ones listed above. She did a kind of penance deciding not to buy any new book for one year which she completely devoted to the books she already had. You can read Susan Hill’s introduction to her intensely personal and warm memoir where she takes us on a voyage around her own bookshelves at :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/16/howards-end-is-on-the-landing-susan-hill or you can click here to download it as a PDF file.

Also read Sarah Crown’s article on this book at :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/oct/16/do-you-know-your-own-books 

Of course, this is a resolution we all can make and follow. I can’t say whether I’ll  follow Susan Hill; but if I do, I’ll surely break that year long self-imposed ban on buying new books just to buy this very book by Susan Hill.