Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology - Couverture souple

Rugg, Julie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0711229236 ISBN 13 : 9780711229235

Editeur : Frances Lincoln, 2010

Synopsis

For bibliophiles, life is full of tricky problems: wondering whether a small trunk full of reading material can be taken on board as hand luggage; how to smuggle yet another guilty stash of tomes past the nearest and dearest. But as Julie Rugg shows in this anthology, bibliophiles are by no means new. For centuries bookish types have been delving in bibliophilia. Buried in Books is a compilation of more than 350 literary extracts, quotations, and bon mots arranged in 14 chapters that cover every aspect of bookish behavior: reading, buying, borrowing, recommending, hunting, even defacing. The selections range from short, pithy quotations to more extensive extracts, and they are taken from diaries, memoirs, novels, plays, and letters by authors from Samuel Pepys to Iain Sinclair, Laurence Sterne to Lucy Mangan. If you are an obsessive reader, stroke this book lovingly, listen as you riffle through the pages, and be proud: you are in good company.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Julie Rugg lives in York with her husband and daughter.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.

R.L. Stevenson, 'A gossip on romance' (1882).



I changed the topic, in despair, to the novels that were scattered about her.

'Can you find nothing there,' I asked, 'to amuse you this wet morning?'

'There are two or three good novels,' she said carelessly, 'but I read them before I left London.'

'And the others won't even do for a dull day in the country?' I went on.

'They might do for some people,' she answered, 'but not for me. I'm rather peculiar, perhaps, in my tastes. I'm sick to death of novels with an earnest purpose. I'm sick to death of outbursts of eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic descriptions, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all that sort of thing. Good gracious me! Isn't the original intention or purpose, or whatever you call it, of a work of fiction to set out distinctly by telling a story? And how many of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as well be sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it's time to dress for dinner; something that keeps me reading, reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end.

Wilkie Collins, The Queen of Hearts (1859).



On Thursday mornings, then, towards ten o'clock, I would often find my long-haired sister still abed and reading. Always pale and absorbed, she read in a grim kind of way, with a cup of chocolate grown cold beside her. She took no more heed of my arrival than of the cries of 'Get up, Juliette!' coming from below stairs. She would read on, mechanically twining one of her snake-like plaits round her wrist and sometimes turning towards me an unseeing glance, that sexless, ageless glance of the obsessed, full of obscure defiance and incomprehensible irony.

Colette, My Mother's House (1922).



I have been reading the Chronicle of the Good Knight Messire Jacques de Lalain, curious but dull from the constant repetition of the same species of combats in the same style and phrase. It is like washing bushels of sand for a grain of gold. It passes the time however, especially in that listless mood when your mind is half on your book half on some thing else: you catch something to arrest the attention every now and then and what you miss is not worth going back upon.

Walter Scott, diary entry, 19th February 1826.



That was when I got into the habit of binge-reading. It's easy to do when you spend hours of every day surrounded by more books than you can ever read. You start one but you're distracted by the idea that you could, equally, have started a different one. By the end of the day you've skimmed two and started four and read the ends of about seven. You can read your way through a library like that without ever properly finishing any of the books.

Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr Y (2006).



We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree (2006).



We are in danger of automatic reading, a mechanical process which leaves scarcely more definite impression on the memory than does the winding of one's watch, or the bolting of the front door at night. Without boiling water we can't make tea. Attention is the boiling water of the mind, and wi

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Frances Lincoln
• Date d'édition: 2010
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0711229236
• ISBN 13: 9780711229235
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible