As I was moving from one study to another last week I started thinking about how dependent I am on the support of a certain set of books. It’s not that I can’t work without them, just that if I am working, I prefer to have them within arm’s reach. It isn’t even necessarily that I’ll need to refer to them (though I might) – more that they’re part of the comfortable scenery, reminders of my own intentions and ambitions (and conspirators in procrastination: if there’s something else I should be doing, you’ll quite often find me flipping through one of these books).

Here’s what’s on my desk:

- The New Oxford Book of English Verse. 1972 edition. Lime green jacket, blue lettering. Chosen and edited by Helen Gardner. Purchased for £4.50 in Hay on Wye a few years ago, during the literary festival, our annual pilgrimage. Once belonged to someone who signed their name (illegible) on the 5th of August, 1978. Some previous owner – maybe the same one – also pedantically (or appropriately?) added “D.B.E., M.A., L.Litt – Prof. of Eng. Lit. Oxford” after Helen Gardner’s name on the title page. I’m not always very good with poetry but it seems important to have some to hand, and I have a sentimental attachment to this particular bulky, out of date volume, because this is how I discovered Louis Macneice: flipping through my new purchase on the train from Hereford, the sun setting outside, the carriage cold, I found “Snow“: “I peel and portion/A tangerine and spit the pips and feel/The drunkenness of things being various.”

- Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems is, of course, also on the desk. It has soft pages and smooth edges; my mother bought it for me one summer day in Bath and just to hold it, let alone to read it, is comforting.

- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.

- Zuleika Dobson. An old orange Penguin paperback (“This edition published…in celebration of the Author’s eightieth birthday, 24 August 1952″) that I bought in Boston, at a used bookshop in Brookline, one hot September night shortly after arriving back from Oxford for the first time. I was using it for research for a while, so it’s marked up and peppered with post-it notes bearing cryptic notes like “‘Mainly architectural…’ + femininity in Oxford” that could, out of context (or even in context) be interpreted to mean almost anything you want. The post-its were bought as a joke from Urban Outfitters and all have obscenities written along the edges, like “Ass” or “Balls” or “Fuck”, so that my attempts at scholarship cannot be taken too seriously.

- The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I have practically written my own book in the margins of this copy so I hope I never lose it, though in a way to read it fresh (without my own subtext) would probably be a good thing for me.

- The Elements of Style. I only keep this on the desk because I feel I should. I had a professor in college who said we should all own a copy, so I went out and bought one, and I have hardly looked at it since. Still, it lends gravity to the line of volumes, and I do like E.B. White’s essays.

- Graham Greene’s In Search of a Character. Stolen (or rather rescued) from a school library. It’s a slim book but I haven’t read the whole thing; I keep it there because of the introduction – “Neither of these journals was kept for publication, but they may have some interest as an indication of the kind of raw material a novelist accumulates. He goes through life discarding more than he retains, but the points he notes are what he considers of creative interest at the moment of occurrence” – and the first line of the Congo journal: “…All I know about the story I am planning is that a man ‘turns up’, and for that reason alone I find myself on a plane between Brussells and Leopoldville.”

-Brideshead Revisited. We have at least three other copies of this in the house but this is the original, bought at a book sale in Santa Ynez, printed in 1945, with its unmistakable Brideshead smell. In the back is a National Express ticket from January 2009, from High Wycombe to Oxford. I have never been to High Wycombe, so this is a complete mystery to me. Over the years this book has come to mean less to me than it used to, but it’s still inconceivable that I could ever sit at a desk and write seriously without it being present.

-The Origin of Species.

- An uncorrected proof of Isolarian by James Attlee, which I read during my first summer here. I guess in a way I think Attlee has written the book that I would have liked to write. At first I was sniffy about this, because I wanted to write it, but now I find it rather soothing, because seeing the book there reminds me that I don’t have to write that book, – the burden has been lifted! – that I have another book (or other books, I should say) to write instead. Also, it’s very good.

- Heart of Darkness. I remember reading this in my last year of high school. I got really into it (some of my notes and essays from that first reading are tucked in the back of this flimsy copy), and I think I mainly keep it visible to remind me that I know how to read, if you see what I mean.

- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I think if Kirsty Young asked me what book I’d like on my desert island in addition to the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, this might be it. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to grow tired of reading it; the delight intsensifies with each re-reading. The book begins to smell worn and right, the pages stained with sunlight.

- Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan. Because the tension described by this line: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” is at the heart of (a lot of) what I think and write about.

- Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. For this line and a million others:

“So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of this to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two – empty – files on my computer, one conveniently called C:\DHL, the other C:\NOVELand sent myself ping-ponging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly, but there was no calm, of course: instead, I felt totally desolate because I realised that I was going to write neither my study of D.H. Lawrence nor my novel.”

- Vile Bodies. There’s a chapter of this book written entirely in dialogue. It’s hilarious and devastating, hilariously devastating, devastatingly hilarious.

- Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. I know this book pretends to be a detective novel, but it isn’t; it’s a love story about Oxford. I can’t remember who, but someone once told me it was “the best of the books about Oxford”, and I’m not sure I could honestly disagree. In any case I do remember that Wodehouse wrote of Sayers that, “It is extraordinary how much better she is than almost all other mystery writers”.

- The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.

- The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Anyone else have any books they don't like to work without?

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Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

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“The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.”

I read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal a few days ago. I hated it. I think it’s fair to say that. I hated it, but I read it anyway. I found a copy of it on the shelf near the bathroom, the one tucked in the alcove at the top of the stairs, while I was excavating the thick stacks of books, searching for more Paul Auster (on the same shelf I uncovered two copies of Man in the Dark and a hardback copy of Travels in the Scriptorium, so not a fruitless endeavor). Anyway, The Dying Animal. An uncorrected bound proof. It was strange to find it in this state – it was published in 2001, why did we have this uncorrected proof, with its flimsy yellow construction-paper cover? I had never read any Philip Roth before. I know I keep saying that – I had never read any Paul Auster before, I had never read any this before, any that before – and if it highlights the enormous gaps in my literary education, let it also indicate a curiosity, a willingness to admit these gaps and then fill them. But I had never read any Philip Roth before and I thought, from the back cover description, that maybe I would like this one.

I hated it – well, if not immediately, then almost immediately. The pleasure of the opening pages – promising! – was diminished by what came after, diminished by my irrational reaction to the white-haired professor’s young lover and her “cream-colored silk blouse”. Why should a cream-colored blouse matter so much to me? The repetition, I guess. Pages and pages of her big breasts and her bowlike lips and her startling self-awareness. None of it ultimately incidental, but all of it seemingly gratuitous. Why do I hate her cream-colored silk blouse? But no matter why: I do, and even so I read the book, the whole book, though I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t simply skimmed the last few pages, coming to the last lines breathlessly and excitedly. At some point during my reading I remembered that Roth had once been shortlisted for some sort of bad sex award.

But it’s this book, not its author, that I object to. And this line – extracted, as it happens, from its sexually explicit setting: “The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.” This I like.

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“The careening interior monologues of Mrs. Dalloway serve as a prescient forecast of today’s hyperlinked, click-through culture”

- Buzz Poole at The Millions

I mean, I haven’t always loved Virginia Woolf, but I like looking at her from this angle.

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“the wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there…his best ideas always seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk. In that sense, then, everything fell into the category of work for him. Eating was work, watching basketball games was work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight was work. In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn’t on the job.”

As a couple, our primary consumerist vice seems to be buying, or at least acquiring, books. Even when neither of us has any money, which is often, scarcely a week goes by that we don’t have an influx of books, a new intake. I don’t know why or even how this is – I don’t set out to add to our extensive collection, but between buying and borrowing and receiving gifts, our extensive collection is undeniably expanding. And we have a lot of books in the house that neither of us has read – or that neither of us has read very closely, anyway. I like this because it makes it feel like my home is a bookshop: there are discoveries, as well as re-discoveries, still to be made here.

Paul Auster’s Leviathan, from which the quote at the top of this post comes, is one such discovery, made after two months of failed attempts to read a whole good book. I started with Women in Love. I began it in October, during our strange Indian summer. One Saturday afternoon, knowing this was probably the last Saturday afternoon of the year that would be so mild, so sweet-smelling and free, I walked down to the café at the end of our street and sat outside in the sun in my shorts and fedora and ordered a green tea and pretended I was in Morocco, or someplace else, at least, sipping something hot to combat the heat of the day. At the time Lawrence seemed perfect; but later, about halfway through the book, I realized I couldn’t bear to read Hermione Roddice’s voice described as “sing-song” one more time. If I read that one more time, I thought, I will crack up, I will break down. I’m not giving Lawrence up forever: just until I get a grip on myself, I thought.

So, remembering my thrill upon discovering Margaret Drabble earlier in the year, I picked up Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The problem here, I told myself after just a few pages, really, was the size of the book: it didn’t slip easily into my handbag, it was hard to hold open with one hand. I couldn’t go on; I would simply have to come back to it later, when I was feeling more physically able, when my strength had returned.

The perfect antidote to this problem was bound to be Paul Harding’s Tinkers – a slim, modern book, just 191 pages long, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a first novel by a man who holds a creative writing MFA. And it turned out to be not bad, not bad at all, but not right, not quite right. I’m not giving this one up forever either: just until it’s what I need, which might be next week or might be next decade.

You never know with books, is the thing: sometimes it’s just right to read something and sometimes it’s not. It’s a lazy way of reading, yes, and I know too that my inability to commit to one book is more a symptom of my currently unpredictable attention span than anything else. But the problem for me is that reading is a competitive sport, not an idle pastime; I feel the effects very keenly, and the desire to leap up off the chair and begin writing something of my own, or to go for a vigorous walk along the river while I contemplate what I’ve just read, is often so strong that I have to suppress it every two or three pages. In the pub, the living room, the park, you can see me glancing up every few minutes, like a startled meerkat, staring at the world and seeing it anew, over and over again. So the fundamental pleasure of reading is enhanced by reading something which is personally timely; the problem is identifying what is personally timely. Who would have guessed that I would happily consume all of Amsterdam in one sitting a few weeks ago? I certainly wouldn’t; I picked it up simply because it was there, on the coffee table.

But the other night I went calmly over to a shelf in our lounge and pulled Leviathan from between The Complete Novels of Jane Austen and Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, where it had been inexplicably resting for several years. I don’t know why I haven’t read it sooner, or why now is exactly the right time to read it, but I am utterly transfixed by it, which is a good feeling, a refreshing feeling. And I’m reminded that reading is part of the job, yes – as much as eating or having a drink with a friend, both of which I also count as work – but, like those things, it is also not just a part of the job.

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