‘What good is a book without pictures of dialogue?’
Jasper Fforde’s bookshelf
Our early books, our first reading primers, we are told to read. Reading is a confoundment at first, then a slow sense of understanding, then a realisation that this new wizardry can open doors that one never thought possible.
I recall the moment I suddenly realised that I could choose to read something of my own volition. And so, with this realisation, I headed off to the household bookshelves to see what I could read. My father was an economist and my mother liked biographies, so the choice for Ffledgling Fforde was limited.
”What good is a book,” I paraphrased to myself, “without pictures of dialogue?” Luckily for me there was a copy of Alice in Wonderland which, joy-of-joys, had both, so I took the book away to the window seat, curled up in that sort of reading ball that is one of the deep joys of childhood and read the book. Twice.
What I remember of that reading was not simply that I could read it but that I got it. The words weren’t squiggles; they represented another world: a rich world of almost unlimited horizons.
I think I read about everything I could get my hands on after that — biographies and economics books had to wait a decade or two — but from that moment on, nothing was ever quite the same again.
I still have the copy of Alice in Wonderland that started this huge, big, glorious, weird adventure. The same copy; pride of place. I want it on my chest when they nail down the coffin lid.
I own tons of books. I have a hard time throwing them away and I even have a pile of books I call my “retirement pile”. All the others are littered around the house and do sterling work as additional insulation during our long Welsh winters. They are ordered by genre: novels, aviation, biography, film, my own books, history and photography. Each has its own particular niche in the house with the spare rooms generally dealing with the books that we can’t bear to throw away yet don’t want to have on view.
I like books that are good, and that’s not genre-specific, so the mix is quite eclectic. If you put my books into iTunes and pressed shuffle you’d get a limited edition unmade film-script by Orson Welles, then a copy of True Grit and after that a photographic journey up the Ganges with Raghubir Singh. One of my favourite books is The Reason Why by Cecil Woodham-Smith. One of Britain’s finest historians, her books tell stories through the dramatis personae of history.
This volume was her account of the disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean war of 1854. Told with dazzling narrative style, wit and with full historical and contextual overview of the period, it reads more like a novel. She also wrote extensively on the Irish Famine, and Florence Nightingale, both of which are also superb.
I always thought that I should read The Lord
of the Rings and War and Peace or even Ulysses to see what the fuss is about but, well, life is too short and I never got around to it. Perhaps one day.