I love rereading books, particularly novels. If I didn’t work in a bookshop I would probably do it much more but almost every week in the shop I am seduced by a pretty jacket, an interesting blurb or a children’s book I need to read for recommendations. The result is fairly predictable; I have piles of unread books at home along with lists of books I want to go back to and read again. Rereading is mostly pure pleasure; occasionally a book doesn’t live up to my memories but usually I simply enjoy it, discovering details I had forgotten or missed the first time.

Compiling the prose anthologies adds even more books to the piles and lists. I unearth old favourites and make new discoveries. Nature Writing, Bedside Book for Gardeners, Bedside Book for Book Lovers and now Bedside Book for Food Lovers all create a reading backlog quite apart from the direct research for extracts. At least I’ll never run out of books I want to read.

Research for Bedside Companion for Food Lovers has created a slightly more serious (but pleasurable) quandary as it has reminded me of series rather than individual books. First Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This is a trilogy but Douglas Adams got carried away and it is actually a trilogy of five books.

E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series consists of six books. Like so many books in this house, I have more than one edition. The hardbacks belonged to a friend, although the first and last are missing. The paperbacks were reissues I bought in the eighties as I wanted my own copies. The friend has long-since died and now I realise I’d like to reread his copies – so I shall need to source the missing hardbacks to complete the set.

More serious is my wish to reread the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. They were recommended by the same friend, who used to ring me at work in Hatchards to read me extracts. I finally read the first one to prove to him that I wasn’t interested in naval fiction set during the Napoleonic Wars. So wrong. I was immediately hooked and read the seventeen that were in print at the time and then waited impatiently for the following volumes. In the end Patrick O’Brian completed twenty in the series before he died, leaving one story unfinished. I remember each book being full of wonderful details so they would not be ones to skip or skim through. I did skip the battles but when I met Patrick O’Brian and confessed this to him, he didn’t seem to mind. He explained that this was why I preferred his writing to C. S. Forrester’s Hornblower series; Forrester is better at battles. I think he was pleased. Reading the seventeen novels took just over three months in the winter of 1995-6, when I think I had more reading time than I do now.  

For those who remember, the friend was John.

Jane