I’m thinking of moving house and I have a lot of books. Too many to reasonably move. My lover, to whom I will move, wants to know what books mean to me. She’s a therapist. I think she thinks that I need to know before I get rid of any. I think she may be right. I might be cutting off an arm, or worse.

The words ‘books contain freedom’ came to me as I contemplated this. The trouble with the statement is that the middle word can give or take away. That might be the essence of the dilemma. Somehow books give me freedom but is it a false freedom? My books represent all my wishes and desires. If there is anything I have ever wanted to know about, on my shelves there will be the book – the best book – on the subject. For instance I have books on all the languages I have at one time or another wanted to learn – Spanish, because so many people speak Spanish; German, to impress a potential girlfriend – I never learnt, but nor did I ever see her again; Estonian – doesn’t everyone need to know at least one Finno Ugric or Uralic language; French, I can’t think why – the meridian is the Greenwich meridian not the Paris meridian – we won; Russian, so I can read Tolstoy in the original (this might need the French, too); Sanskrit, for the Yoga; Japanese – I even have a book in Japanese for when it’s done; Latin – plant names, obviously.

Which brings me neatly on to gardening and plants. I have a whole section of gardening books ranging from Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole published in 1666 – I have the 1915 reprint – to a treatise on garden gnomes.

I’m breaking off from the list for a note to my therapist. When I look at the gardening books – they are beside me as I write this – I travel back in time. I feel both nostalgia and fear. Last night I was attempting to make a selection of books that I would absolutely need to keep. It was impossible. I wasn’t even taking them off the shelves. I was simply pulling them out a bit from the shelf. I got stuck in the gardening section. My books are my dreams.

Still in the therapy section of this blog. When I was a child my father read out loud to us. He read Winnie the Pooh first – I have a first edition of The House at Pooh Corner – then Narnia, then The Three Musketeers, then The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I have a tendency to say that my father never gave me anything, but he read all those books to me. In amongst this I read a bit of Enid Blyton before graduating to Ian Fleming. I’m not sure what happened after that. Wilfred Owen, I suppose. Then books became icons. I remember asking my friend Clive for a list of books to read in order to be ‘well read’. I think he laughed at me. So I made a list in my head and I have them all now, and I have read a good few of them.

OK this is a total side-track. There now follows a quiz. I gave a talk a long while ago which included favourite bits from my books. I had a picture of the cover, but that would be too easy. I will give a prize to the first person to list them all in the comments column:

 

1

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;

Being purg’d, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;

Being vex’d, a sea nourish’d with lovers’ tears;

2

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits.

 

3

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm,

 

4

“What great eyes you’ve got, Granny.”

“All the better to see you, child”

“And what great teeth you’ve got, Granny”

“All the better to eat you up!”

And saying this, the wicked Wolf leapt on Little Red Riding-hood and ate her all up.

 

5

The meat of the stone crabs was the tenderest, sweetest shellfish he had ever tasted. It was perfectly set off by the dry toast and slightly burned taste of the melted butter. The champagne seemed to have the faintest scent of strawberries. It was ice cold.

 

6

The King asked

The Queen, and

The Queen asked

The Dairymaid:

“Could we have some butter for

The Royal slice of bread?”

The Queen asked

The Dairymaid,

The Dairymaid

Said ”Certainly,

I’ll go and tell

The cow

Now

Before she goes to bed.”

The Dairymaid

She curtsied,

And went and told

The Alderney:

“Don’t forget the butter for

The Royal slice of bread.”

 

7

A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, ‘This toast is to be eaten – I must make it eatable’? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes.

 

8

The sweetness of the tea spreads through Andrei. If he were alone he’d dip the last crust of the bread in it. Nothing nicer than black bread dipped in sweet tea…

‘Go ahead if you like. I don’t mind.’

‘What?’

‘Dip your bread. We all do here – me and Kolya, even Marina Petrovna’

 

9

She saw him not, or mark’d not, if she saw,

One among many, tho’ his face was bare.

But Arthur, looking downward as he past,

Felt the light of her eyes into his life

Smite on the sudden, yet rode on, and pitch’d

His tents beside the forest.

 

10

Part of the moon was falling down the west,

Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills

Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it

And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand

Among the harplike morning-glory strings

Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,

As if she played unheard some tenderness

 

11

She knew she could get to a place where doing it hurt a little but still felt good, but she knew that wasn’t it. What Eddie wanted to hear was that it hurt a lot and made her feel bad, but she liked it anyway. Which made no sense at all to Mona, but she’d learned to tell it the way he wanted her to.

 

12

may I feel said he

(i’ll squeal said she

just once said he)

it’s fun said she

 

(may i touch said he

how much said she

a lot said he)

why not said she

 

13

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with the pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for

 

14

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

15

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread, till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to mere chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays of a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

 

16

Reader, I married him.

 

17

He could not explain to his friends the coolness that had come into his relationship with Mrs Morales, since he was the owner of only one house; nor could he, in courtesy to Mrs Morales, describe his own pleasure at that coolness.

 

18

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

 

19

The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens – finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

 

20

In the creakings and noises,

an old conversation

-not concerning us,

but recognisable, somewhere,

back in the bus:

Grandparents voices

uninterruptedly

talking, in Eternity

 

Talking the way they talked

in the old featherbed,

peacefully, on and on,

 

 

Well that’s twenty books I wouldn’t want to be without, although I now see one of them is missing. I’d forgotten some of them, I wrote the list some time ago, but each of these extracts is deeply moving to me. Is this part of the need to possess all these books?

I’m not sure how to proceed. I’m not sure if I’m in the therapy section or the comedy section.

I’m remembering a book that I don’t have by Italo Calvino. It begins with a list of types of books that one has. This is my version: Books you think you ought to read; books you have read and might read again; books you want to appear to have read; books you absolutely plan to read; reference books that contain valuable information not available on the internet; travel books; books by people you know; atlas for use in decoupage; dictionaries to find correct plural for atlas (and disagree with it because it looks wrong); it goes on and on.

There is a thing though. I’ve just been at a festival, Colourfest, and I had a quite wonderful time, a wonderful life-changing magnificent time, and not once did I say to myself, ‘I wish I had my books with me’.

So clearly, more therapy is needed. I will keep you posted!

And the quiz – answers in the comments column please, and a prize for the first correct answer.