Product Description

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill’s eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. Howard’s End is on the Landing charts the journey of one of the nation’s most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #653 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
`A totally beguiling, utterly persuasive, argument for reimmersing yourself in literature's past...' --Michael Gove, The Times

'An eloquent advocate [for] the virtues of wide-ranging, deeply felt and considered reading... to be cherished' --Michael Arditti, Daily Telegraph

`Evoked with precision and grace... beguiling' --Victoria Glendinning, Spectator

`[A] vividly experienced journey... viewing books and their authors with a learned, gossipy warmth.'
--Metro

`The blend of book chat and personal memoir, though apparently serendipitous, is associative and intimate' --Iain Finlayson, The Times

'A timeless creation, [it] will give endless pleasure not only to Hill's many admirers but also to anyone who values books.' --Herald

`A light-hearted memoir using books as anchors on which to fasten life experiences. Funny, educational and occasionally surprising' --Catholic Herald

'Both a passionate reminder of the importance of reading and a revealing glimpse of a writer's life' --Observer

`Delightful... an idiosyncratic commingling of fiction, non-fiction and poetry...Hill has a voracious and varied appetite' --New Statesman

'The memoir's texture is wholesome and cosy; an indulgent quilt in which to nestle before the blazing hearth of literary tradition'
--Caroline Howitt, TLS

`Delightful... Charming... Her legion of fans will love it' --Ian Pindar, Guardian

`The narrative unreels in what Dr Johnson would call `loose sallies of the mind'... A distinguished woman of letters' --John Sutherland, Literary Review

'Fans of Hill's work will be delighted by this leisurely ramble through the author's mind and reading pleasures' --Mslexia

`Pure pleasure... I simply want to emulate Susan Hill's year... To take books from my shelves, to sit, to read.'
--Country Living

From the Inside Flap
Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill’s eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. Considering everything from Macbeth and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy through Virginia Woolf, Dickens and Roald Dahl, Howards End is on the Landing charts the journey of one of the nation’s most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

From the Back Cover
‘The journey began in the old farmhouse where I live, surrounded by the gently rising hills and graceful trees, the ploughed and planted fields, the hedgerows and flower borders and orchards and old stone walls, the deer and birds and hedgehogs and rabbits, the foxes and badgers and moths and bees of Gloucestershire. I climbed two flights of elm-wood stairs to the top landing in search of a book, and found myself embarked on a year of travelling through the books of a lifetime.’

Customer Reviews

A must for anyone who loves books and reading
I found myself rationing my reading of this book because I didn't want to reach the end. It is far more than a list of books Susan Hill read during the year when she decided not to buy any new ones. It is a memoir which includes fascinating insights into other authors she has met during her life in the literary sphere.

The author's love of books and reading shines out from every page and provides new authors to explore for anyone reading it. After reading Hill's thoughts on Dickens I may well give him another try as I don't think I've given his books a fair chance. There are excursions into lesser known 19th and 20th century authors as well as the classics. There are chapters on short stories and essays as well as novels and children's picture books and there is one on spiritual reading which I found truly inspiring. At the end there is a list of 40 books the author decided she could not live without - a sort of Desert Island Discs for books. But there are far more than these 40 mentioned and discussed in the text.

I did not agree with all the author's conclusions but I do agree that both Anthony Trollope and Anita Brookner are underrated as authors. The book is written in a subtle unobtrusive style which is something of a trade mark for Susan Hill. George Orwell wrote that a good writer's prose should be transparent so that the reader is unaware of reading it only aware of the message conveyed. In this book Hill achieves just that. I loved it and would recommend it to anyone who loves books and reading.

An irresistible book about books for booklovers
Susan Hill's latest is a memoir about reading the books in her house and the stories they are associated with. At the heart of HEIOTL, as I shall abbreviate it to, is Hill's decision not to add to her house full of books for a year (except for books she is to review); to explore her collection and find new books to read in it, to re-discover lost gems and re-read favourites, and then to compile a list of the forty books she couldn't live without.

Each shelf examined brings reminiscences. There are stories about encounters with great writers and celebrated personages, who all seemed to be very supportive of the young novelist, and indeed many of them became friends. I loved all this name-dropping, and particularly enjoyed the chapter about Benjamin Britten whose 'Sea Interludes' provided an epiphany for Hill (I love them too - they were marvellous to play many years ago in Croydon Youth Philharmonic Orchestra); the story about Alan Clark was good also.

There are many discussions of writers and their books. Hill is refreshingly honest about what she doesn't enjoy reading as well as her literary loves - she's no Austenite, but reveres much of Thomas Hardy, she can't be doing with Terry Pratchett and Sci-Fi in general but did concede to liking John Wyndham but puts him in the horror pile. I was delighted that she loves Ian Fleming, John Le Carré and Michael Connelly too.

Although I haven't read him, her chapter about W.G.Sebald does make me want to read The Rings of Saturn. She writes "But so many places on a Sebald journey are eerie, deserted, out of date, and lie under a pall of dismal weather. In The Rings of Saturn he walks through East Anglia and manages to make places I know well, and have found sparkling and lively, suicidally depressing." I lived and worked for nearly two years in and around Great Yarmouth - a South Londoner fresh out of uni and mostly have never felt so lonely as then.

Then at the last pages we get to the final forty, the snapshot in time of the forty books she couldn't do without - well on that day at least, for she says she would probably pick a different 40 tomorrow. The natural extension of this is to start compiling one's own forty - but that's a project for another day ...

Every year I say I must read more books from my TBR mountains. Do I think I could do as Hill did and not buy any new books for a whole year? It would be nice, but I don't think I can. My biggest problem post-HEIOTL is the number of books I've added to my wishlist, and may have to buy/acquire, after reading it - an index would have been slightly helpful here! I love reading books about books, and this one (with its lovely cover) didn't disappoint at all.

Lightly entertaining, but for me a bit disappointing
I was greatly looking forward to this book having read wonderful reviews of it. However, unlike the other reviewers here, I found a lot of what this book said a bit... commonplace. I don't need to be told that Great Expectations is a good place to start reading Dickens. And when she does say something intriguing, such as "you should never begin reading George Eliot with Middlemarch", she doesn't explain why! Leaving me a little frustrated.

I think this book is probably great for Susan Hill fans who adore her style, but I honestly felt many of the observations were a bit unthought-out. For example, she finds on one bookshelf at home a pile of long-forgotten Elizabethan tragedies belonging to her husband. She then says they aren't worth reading because of course, if they were any good, we'd already have heard of them. I would have thought her husband's recent book on Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights, some of whom are now being rediscovered to the delight of audiences, might have convinced her otherwise.

I hope I don't sound churlish. I really wanted to enjoy this book, to dive into a luxurious book about books and reading, something like Ex LIbris by Anne Fadiman. I didn't find it to my taste. I'm glad other readers enjoyed it more than I did.