I have a project that will forever remain on my to-do list. There’s just no way I’ll ever have time. The priority level will never increase from a nice-to-achieve to a really-needs-to-be-done. Instead it will always be classified as unnecessary-perfection-because-who’s-got-time. So the problem is two-fold: I have too many books (can that ever be a problem?) and they all co-exist on my bookshelves in completely unclassified randomness. I’ve promised myself I’d only buy books on my kindle (great invention, A Suitable Boy on a kindle would have been awesome,  plus you never lose your page) but my resolve frequently crumbles. Which means I have absolutely zero way of finding a book that I know I own if I suddenly need it. But contemplating this first world problem, as I was looking for Romeo and Juliet for Only Daughter the other day, I thought about how all these books had shaped me over the decades. Which got me thinking about my life through books.

I learned to speak French before English but I learned to read English first. So my first books were Peter and Jane which were unspeakably boring and would now be considered problematically sexist and not terribly multicultural. My brothers (a few years younger) had books about pirates, griffins and treasure, which looked vastly more exciting although I guess that these too would fail to qualify as politically correct these days now that we know that pirates were in fact horrid people and also, these multicoloured-monikered (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow) pirates where very much pale and male! I survived Peter and Jane and still went on to love reading. I was neither precocious nor erudite in my early years. I really loved Enid Blyton although I was aware that this wasn’t considered worthy even back then. I mean sure, they weren’t as good as say, Black Beauty, or Little Women, but back in the days, we didn’t have YouTube or whatever to scroll through if you wanted something soothingly mind-numbing. I have since heard say  that some of her books were sexist and racist, but I am a bit astounded that they can’t just be seen (and left alone) as a product of their time. It’s not like we go round editing sexist and racist stuff out of Shakespeare or Dickens. Or even the Willard Price adventure books that I loved but were very much of their time, and contained their fair share of sexism (I think the only females in the books were animals), and racism (the protagonists were often in African countries being “heroes”…) But to be fair, they did expand my horizon more than the famous five! I was initiated into all things historical by Jean Plaidy who wrote questionable novels about the Kings and Queens of yore! But her books sparked my enduring love of history, providing a solid foundation of knowledge that I’ve been building on ever since. It may have inadvertently sown the seeds of Feminism in my young and impressionable brain as women (albeit queens and princesses) in her books always seemed to get a bum deal.

My first foray into the world of literary classics was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I was simultaneously enchanted (the dresses, the balls, the romance) and horrified (the precariousness of life and of your position in the world) by that era where women’s survival depended on making a good match. But the real revelation was that “Classics” were actually a good yarn, not the inaccessible haute-literature that I’d feared I wouldn’t like or understand.  Having tested the waters with Austen, I cautiously delved into Oliver Twist and again, it was astonishingly good. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. A certain amount of pretentiousness followed that realisation. War and Peace was swallowed whole one summer (Only Daughter’s name may have been purloined from that epic, but then again,  if she’d been a boy, she’d have been Julian out of the Famous Five so go figure!) Closely followed by several other Russian classics. Anna Karenina, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment. Luckily I did intersperse these epics with lighter fare. Terry Pratchett’s Disc World novels always had me hiccuping with laughter but there was so much wisdom in in his wit. I grew up spoiled and sheltered but Pratchett taught me so much about the world. I’ll never forget Granny Weatherwax who was probably the prototype grumpy old woman, a witch, obviously, but also the wise woman that people called to deliver their babies. What a role model!

Books have taken me around the world and across millennia accompanying heroes and and heroines in a myriad of adventures. I’ve spent time with families torn apart by Civil wars, I’ve witnessed the brutality of colonialism, the horrors of partitions (turns out there have been a few, most notably the dreadful one in India/Pakistan, but also Greece/Turkey); I’ve been warned about (not-so) dystopian futures; lived through plagues and pandemics; I’ve seen the World Wars from a dozen different angles;  I’ve been in gaol, unfairly imprisoned, escaped from prison, transported to the colonies; I’ve been emperor and serf, warrior and priest, unborn child and ghost, mermaid and astronaut and pretty much everything in between. There’s been romance and tenderness, but also murder most vile. There’s been magic and enchantment and some epic battles between good and evil. All of this with a humble book and a dollop of imagination. I’ve had to forgo countless films because I’d already read the book, and while these stories deserve to be retold, it’s not the same experience if, say, you already know who dunnit! I’ve laughed so hard on the tube that people have stared. I’ve shed noisy and snotty tears. I’ve experienced the thrill of reading a long awaited sequel, and the near-grief that comes with finishing a particularly good novel.

But the saddest thing is that I will not be passing these books onto my children. Like many youngsters, they do read, obviously, just not books. Why should they? I grew up with four TV channels and not much to watch. They have rather more choice! I live in hope! Luckily I have nephews and nieces who are voracious readers,  proper book worms, with whom I’m hoping to share the most gripping of these adventures. I’ve already passed on some Jean Plaidy, and this made me so happy. All these pages deserve to see the light of day more than once. Setting people up with a good book gives me such a buzz; I love that feeling of smugness when you know the book and its recipient have been perfectly matched. And that would begin to solve the excessive book problem, except, of course, I want them all back because there really is no such thing as too many books. They’re mine, all mine, my prrreciousssss!