A beautiful reflection by Departmental Lecturer Kate Longworth on her relationship with reading
I didn’t realise until I sat down to write this how consuming, even dysfunctional, a relationship I have with reading and with books. I think about reading possibly more than anything else. Even eating. I currently have a bag of books in the boot of my car, waiting for my husband to be out of the house so that I can sneak them in unnoticed.
When I’m thinking about reading I’m thinking about books that I have and books that I want, but I’m also weighed down by how many books there are still to read. I’m dividing books into shifting categories in my mind which only partly mirror the piles that exist around the house. There are a few piles in my office, at least one for each current academic and/or creative project I have on the go, and others for books that made it from the boot to the office and which I haven’t shelved yet. I move these books around a lot—not necessarily as a function of having read them, often just as a way of sorting out how I feel about a project or just life in general. There is a pile on the landing, books from past lives that I can’t bring myself to part with, but which somehow don’t belong in my office. Then there are two piles on my bedside table, fiction and non-fiction. Just before bed is when I read for ‘fun’. I carry guilt in relation to reading for fun, though, as there’s so much still to learn, so I also have an e-reader, which contains its own virtual piles of the crime novels I read to try to forget about the piles of books that surround me.
Starting with crime, then, I think Mick Herron’s new Slow Horses novel contains his best writing to date. The textually sonic precision of Herron’s prose style can’t, in my opinion, be rendered on screen, so however good the TV show is, I’d suggest not missing the books. I’m planning a research article on Agatha Christie, and hers are making regular trips between the bedside table and two teetering piles in the office. I’m planning to focus in the first instance on representations of adoption and the care system in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Ordeal by Innocence and The Mousetrap. I think she’s severely underrated as a prose stylist.
I tend to read contemporary fiction on the e-reader, but sometimes books feel so important to me that I end up buying them in hard copy too. Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain have made that transition in the last month or so (from the personal I find myself dwelling a lot on what Stuart does to foreground a regional and working-class cadence). I’m also working my way back through Elizabeth Bowen, currently The Last September.
When I recently saw my own work categorised as ‘intellectual history’ I felt mingled overwhelm and laugh-out-loud-and-pinch-yourself gratitude. Richard Rorty wrote a brilliant essay prizing this field as ‘the story of the people who made splendid but largely unsuccessful attempts to ask the questions we ought to be asking.’ There have been five books in the past year or so which have made me want to run around holding them aloft and pressing them on people. Our Creative Writing MSt students know my feelings about Questlove’s historiographically magnificent Hip Hop Is History—it’s difficult to think of a good reason not to read it. One of my cats is named after Charles Taylor, whose recent Cosmic Connections is the second part of his joyfully surprising narrative of what humans try to do with language. As with Taylor, everything Simon Critchley writes makes me feel like I’m being warmly welcomed into dialogue with some of the greatest minds in history, and I’m happy to exercise a cliché in insisting that his recent book on Tragedy is a must-read. I was a few years late to Peter E Gordon’s Continental Divide, the story of a public conversation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos, but now everything he writes is on pre-order. And I don’t know how Bill Mander manages to make the narrative-arc-defying variance present within the story of British Idealism so unputdownable. Incidentally, he offers a rare degree of insight into the wonderful TH Green, an important figure in the history of Oxford’s Lifelong Learning department (and the namesake of another of my cats).
Poetry is always close by – Raymond Antrobus’s recent book is to hand, as well as the TS Eliot prize-nominated collection from course alum Isabelle Baafi. I’ll finish with something from a regularly revisited poet, Edna St Vincent Millay, which sums up my relationship with my fortress of books:
Siege
This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.
White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god,—
Maybe next year, when I’m richer—
Carved beads and a lotus pod…
And all this time
Death beating the door in.
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