Take a photo of a barcode or cover
happylilkt 's review for:
3.5 stars
Hill takes the reader on a literal and figuratively meandering tour of her home library. Sometimes the tour worked for me and other times I felt that her reminiscing was so specific to her generation of publishing/writing, that it was no longer for the reader... It was an aging person's monologue in an attempt to remember and to claim that they were once in the fast lane of life. That's being said overall I'm glad I read it. There were some passages I really loved:
"I could spend my year of reading from home with Dickens alone—well, almost. In the silly game of which authors to throw overboard from the lifeboat in which one—just one—to save, I would always save Dickens. He is mighty. His flaws are huge but magnificent—and all of a piece with the whole. A perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one. Yes, he is sentimental, yes he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes, some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breathtaking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an old master, in vivid color and richness on huge canvases. His prose is spacious, symphonic, infinitely flexible. He can portray evil and create a menacing atmosphere of malevolence better than any other writer. He is macabre, grotesque, moralistic, thunderous, funny, ridiculous, heartfelt. There's no area of life he does not illuminate, no concern or cause he does not make his own, no sentences, no descriptions, no exchanges, no sadnesses or tragedies or betrayals..." (32-3)
"Humour in books is a very personal thing and not a subject about which to be superior. I am always overjoyed when my recommendation of P.G. Wodehouse is successful. Only recently, when I recommended a friend start with 'The Mating Season,' the next email I got from him was headed 'What ho!' But it ain't always so. Another friend said he couldn't see the point of spending time with such silly [fools]. You can't convert someone like that, you just have to let it be." (54-5)
"There is no reason why most of the books I own but have never actually read should be more or less in one place. They just are. Maybe they quietly gravitated into the sitting room one by one, to sob and huddle together for warmth." (63)
"As I climbed to the top of the house I came upon a book here on a stair, another book there on a window ledge, a small pile of books on the step outside of bedroom door, and saw that half of the books here lead a peripatetic life, never knowing where they will be expected later heads next, all the rest sleep soundly for years and the same position, quite undisturbed. But as in the fairy tales, sooner or later someone wakes you, even from a sleep of a hundred years, and so I have woken books and taken them out, shaken them and slapped them on the back, opened them to the light and fresh air, sneezing as the dust has puffed up from their pages. It must have been a shock for them. Or perhaps it was a wonderful liberation, as they were brought back to life and fresh purpose like Lazarus, for a book which is closed and unread is not alive, it is only packed, like a fetus, with potential.
"And as I climbed I noticed a paperback half-hanging out of a shelf and found, as I started to push it back, that it was an alphabet book and then it had found its way next to a book with letters and lettering, like a child and a grandparent, sitting companionably together." (232-3)
Hill takes the reader on a literal and figuratively meandering tour of her home library. Sometimes the tour worked for me and other times I felt that her reminiscing was so specific to her generation of publishing/writing, that it was no longer for the reader... It was an aging person's monologue in an attempt to remember and to claim that they were once in the fast lane of life. That's being said overall I'm glad I read it. There were some passages I really loved:
"I could spend my year of reading from home with Dickens alone—well, almost. In the silly game of which authors to throw overboard from the lifeboat in which one—just one—to save, I would always save Dickens. He is mighty. His flaws are huge but magnificent—and all of a piece with the whole. A perfect, flawless Dickens would somehow be a shrunken, impoverished one. Yes, he is sentimental, yes he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes, some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breathtaking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an old master, in vivid color and richness on huge canvases. His prose is spacious, symphonic, infinitely flexible. He can portray evil and create a menacing atmosphere of malevolence better than any other writer. He is macabre, grotesque, moralistic, thunderous, funny, ridiculous, heartfelt. There's no area of life he does not illuminate, no concern or cause he does not make his own, no sentences, no descriptions, no exchanges, no sadnesses or tragedies or betrayals..." (32-3)
"Humour in books is a very personal thing and not a subject about which to be superior. I am always overjoyed when my recommendation of P.G. Wodehouse is successful. Only recently, when I recommended a friend start with 'The Mating Season,' the next email I got from him was headed 'What ho!' But it ain't always so. Another friend said he couldn't see the point of spending time with such silly [fools]. You can't convert someone like that, you just have to let it be." (54-5)
"There is no reason why most of the books I own but have never actually read should be more or less in one place. They just are. Maybe they quietly gravitated into the sitting room one by one, to sob and huddle together for warmth." (63)
"As I climbed to the top of the house I came upon a book here on a stair, another book there on a window ledge, a small pile of books on the step outside of bedroom door, and saw that half of the books here lead a peripatetic life, never knowing where they will be expected later heads next, all the rest sleep soundly for years and the same position, quite undisturbed. But as in the fairy tales, sooner or later someone wakes you, even from a sleep of a hundred years, and so I have woken books and taken them out, shaken them and slapped them on the back, opened them to the light and fresh air, sneezing as the dust has puffed up from their pages. It must have been a shock for them. Or perhaps it was a wonderful liberation, as they were brought back to life and fresh purpose like Lazarus, for a book which is closed and unread is not alive, it is only packed, like a fetus, with potential.
"And as I climbed I noticed a paperback half-hanging out of a shelf and found, as I started to push it back, that it was an alphabet book and then it had found its way next to a book with letters and lettering, like a child and a grandparent, sitting companionably together." (232-3)