Buried in Books
A Reader's Anthology

Following her highly successful Book Addict's Treasury, compiled with Lynda Murphy, Julie Rugg returns with a second anthology of literary extracts, quotations and bon mots concerning every aspect of bookish behaviour: reading, buying. borrowing, recommending, hunting, even defacing. This anthology includes diaries, memoirs, novels, plays and letters by authors from Samuel Pepys to Iain Sinclair, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Nick Hornby, from Laurence Sterne to Lucy Mangan. A perfect gift for the book obsessive in your life.

Introduction
1. 'A charming eccentricity': degrees of bibliomania
2. 'Rapt clean of ourselves': reading
3. 'Sometimes, profound epiphanies'
4. 'Treat personal book recommendations with the suspicion they deserve'
5. 'The pleasant thing is…': the time and place for a book
6. 'The good practice of buying a book a day'
7. 'Muddling among old books'
8. 'He spoils every decent book on which he lays his hands'
9. 'A history of its own': a book's life
10. 'It was amazing really where the word librarian would get you'
11. 'An early taste for reading'
12. 'The books that you read were all I loved you for'
13. 'Tempted in so subtle a shape'
14. 'An intense grievance': having nothing to read

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 without it there arises no fragrance or refreshment from our reading.
Edward Butler, 'A table talk on books and reading' (1885).

And yet, though I have read so much, I am a bad reader. I read slowly and I am a poor skipper. I find it difficult to leave a book, however bad and however much it bores me, unfinished. I could count on my fingers the number of books that I have not read from cover to cover. On the other hand there are few books that I have read twice. I know very well that there are many of which I cannot get the full value on a single reading, but in that they have given me all I was capable of getting at the time, and this, though I may forget their details, remains a permanent enrichment.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

Now, I do not believe dogmatically either in fast or slow reading. I believe tripe should be read practically with the speed of light and, let us say, Toynbee's A Study of History with tortoise deliberation. And most books are nearer to tripe than to Toynbee. But the trouble with practically all of us is that we suffer from chronic reverence. We make the unwarranted assumption that because a man is in print he has something to say. This may be good manners, but it's a confounded waste of time.
Clifton Fadiman, Reading I've Liked (1947).