Top 10 bookworms in fiction
Reading has always been everything to me, keeping me afloat when the sea of life gets choppy. Working in a bookshop added another dimension; not only was I was soothed in a near magical way by the physical presence of the books, but talking to strangers about them could always lift my mood. What joy, then, to explore all that in a bibliographic memoir. I imagined my dream customer, addressed them directly, and proffered anecdotes and themed booklists. Dear Reader was born.
My ulterior motive was that the novel I was writing was rather too full of characters who did little other than read. ‘“That’s no good,” I said to myself. “Fiction needs action!” I decided to restrain myself when it came to my novel, Everyone Is Still Alive.
But it didn’t work out that way. I tried, but I proved incapable of creating a cast who didn’t read at all. So, I surrendered to the inevitable. I would be the author of a novel in my own beloved sub-genre of books that are not only fiction, but about fiction; that are full of bookworms who strive to make sense of themselves and their world by reading and writing about it. Here, roughly in the order I encountered them, are 10 of my most cherished.
1. Anne of Green Gables by LM MontgomeryOrphan Anne Shirley felt as real to me as any of the flesh and blood little girls I knew, and I longed to be able to climb into the pages and join her story club. We have a lot in common. Anne is a ferocious bookworm who gets into trouble for reading Ben Hur in class because she just can’t stop until she knows how the chariot race will turn out. Such is the lure of reading, that she has to get her guardian, Matthew, to lock up tempting books in the jam closet until she has finished her homework.
2. I Capture the Castle by Dodie SmithCassandra Mortmain writes her diary while sitting in the kitchen sink, capturing her eccentric family. Her father, still famous for his experimental novel Jacob’s Ladder, is now stuck and does nothing but read as many detective novels as he can find. Cassandra’s beautiful sister, Rose, frets because she has no clothes and no opportunities. When they hear that rich Americans are about to move in next door, it reminds them of the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Mrs Bennet says that Netherfield Hall is let at last. Perhaps now something exciting will happen …
3. Anna Karenina by Leo TolstoyI’ve been reading and rereading this novel since my teens. My favourite scene these days is near the beginning when Anna is returning from meeting Vronsky for the first time and scarcely wants to admit the attraction. On the train home she reads an English novel and it is her impatience and frustration that signal to us that she is about to transgress: “It was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflections of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.”
4. The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane HowardIn the first of the Cazalet chronicles, Howard layers up satisfying details about what everyone is reading. Somerset Maugham, Margaret Irwin, Howard Spring and Angela Thirkell all get a mention and the characters are in and out of bookshops. When the brothers and their wives meet at the family home in the country, everyone chooses a book that reveals much about their character.
5. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers“Reading is an escape to me. Is it to you?” While investigating a death that occurs during the Armistice Day parade, Lord Peter Wimsey learns a lot about his suspect from her bookcase – Woolf, Mansfield, DH Lawrence – and rightly concludes that she is unhappy rather than guilty of a crime. Wimsey says that when he was in a nursing home with shell shock all he could do was play patience and read detective stories: “All the others had the War in them – or love … or some damn’ thing I didn’t want to think about.”
6. The English Patient by Michael OndaatjeIn a villa north of Florence in 1945, Hana chooses books from the huge library to read to her badly burned patient, who was rescued by the Bedouin when his plane crashed in the desert. He is damaged beyond recognition and has no memory. The only possession that survived the fire is his copy of The Histories by Herodotus, into which he has glued pages from other books and written observations in his small, gnarled handwriting. They live quietly and slowly, and then everything changes with the arrival of a friend of Hana’s father who has a theory about the identity of her patient.
7. My Brilliant Friend by Elena FerranteElena, a writer in her 60s, learns of the disappearance of her old friend Lila and resolves to write down everything she remembers of their friendship growing up together in a poor and violent neighbourhood of Naples. The girls bought a copy of Little Women and read it together until it was tattered and sweat-stained and fell apart. When they were still children, Lila wrote a novel called The Blue Fairy but it is Elena who becomes a published writer. All through their lives, literature, education and the question of who has the right to tell a story weaves through