a meditation on books

Via @mikecane The books you want to keep on reading http://bit.ly/14XuUL

Diana Athill, quoted in the Guardian: (emphasis mine)

But it was, in fact, a passage towards the end of the book, when she returns to the present day and briefly considers the enthusiasms that remain with her, that really caught my eye. Books are chief among these, but "fiction these days", she says, "has to be more than well-written to hold me. Like most of the old people I know, what I am looking for is material for my own imagination to work on, rather than experience predigested by someone else into a story". She goes on to mention Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Pat Barker, Hilary Mantel and, rather splendidly, David Foster Wallace as purveyors of the sort of fiction that achieves this for her ("'Look-at-me!' writing of the Martin Amis kind … has always left me cold").

This intrigued me for a number of reasons. Firstly, I've always subscribed to the idea that books serve different purposes for us at different points in our lives (who hasn't reread a book they first came across as a teenager and been baffled by the pleasure we took in it – or loved it just as much but for completely different reasons?), and it's oddly exciting to be offered an insight into the role it might play later in life. Secondly – this is more personal – the list of authors she mentions tallies almost directly with a list of my own favourites (Pat Barker is the only one I'd leave off) which leads me to wonder what, precisely, my reading age is. Finally, though, I was fascinated and moved by her final words on the subject. "Some of my most beloved books – those of Tolstoy and Jane Austen, for example," she says, "I have deliberately left aside for a long time because I want to come back to them once more before I die with a fresh eye."

This brought me up short. There's something deeply upsetting about the notion of someone – and one day, yourself – reaching the point where you put down Pride and Prejudice and think, well, that's the last time I'll read that. When I read a book I really love, part of the pleasure for me is the knowledge that it's not gone forever; that I'll come back to it in a couple of years' time. Recognising that a point will come where this isn't the case could well constitute the closest I've ever come to acknowledging my own mortality … Then, there's the question of which books you'd store up for a final read. I'd put Wuthering Heights in there, I think, and definitely Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, and Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill. If it's not too maudlin, I'd be interested to hear what you'd choose, too. Either way, I recommend Athill's Yesterday Morning heartily – whether you've read it before or not.

It's not the five books you would take to a desert island, you already know those books. It's the books that, if you had a space and a time andthe access, that you would spend slow reading because it's like being held in a safe space.