This candid and sometimes humorous memoir makes for an interesting and easy read, even if one does not like poetry or Shakespeare or plan to read Virginia Woolf any time soon. Books about books can sometimes fall a little flat but here it is edifying to see an author 'plugging' writers like Trollope, Dickens, Hardy and Pym and at the same time willing to admit she doesn't 'get' Jane Austen.

Susan Hill's dismissive attitude towards e-reader devices and the Internet, however, is nonsensical. If more people read books (esp. copyright-free classics) because of e-readers, and interest in books in general is fuelled by the Internet and sites such as LibraryThing, then where is the harm? (By the way, there ARE electronic readers on the market that let you annotate in the margins and make notes!). I concede that the Internet can be a time-waster, but browsing and surfing book sites can be educational. Early on in the book Hill has a dig at (well-organised) bibliophiles who keep their reading lists on computers or who use Internet sites to catalogue their books. Ironically, if it hadn't been for the Internet and the various literary blogs I follow I would not have been aware of 'Howards End is on the Landing'. And without my LT catalogue I'd probably never manage my TBR list well enough to get around to reading a book such as this.

I wonder if Susan Hill's books will ever be made available in e-reader format on her website? ;-) ( )

I really didn’t know what to expect with this book. Well yes actually I did. I expected Susan Hill to discuss a year’s worth of her reading from home. Whilst this happened you do have to delve deep within the covers to find this. Once you’ve worked your way through the people and authors Susan Hill has met and believe me they are covered in some depth here and the details of when she wrote her first book, set up her printing press etc (in short, a very much autobiographical book) you get to the information about the 40 books.

This took me by surprise. I had expected more than 40 books read in a year from a prolific writer. I assumed she would equally be an avid reader and I genuinely expected to discover some gem I could go on to read myself. I did enjoy reading about how the books came into her life and why she might have bought them. I also enjoyed the images of her wandering through the house from top to bottom looking at her shelves. For any avid reader we all have far too many books and kid ourselves we’ll get them all read in our lifetime.

Going a year without buying books as a reader is a challenge and a half but I still can’t get away from the fact that forty books listed in the closing pages were the forty she opted for when most of them she’d already read at some point in her life. Wasn’t this the chance to discover something hidden in the depths of the bookshelves?

There are some wonderful laugh out loud moments that anyone who reads will find funny. I even saw glimpses of myself in many of the comments she makes such as those about online book groups and blogs etc. Overall, it was an enjoyable afternoon reading the book but I didn’t feel this book lived up to its blurb unfortunately. ( )

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. ( )

This should be read by anyone who loves books.In it Susan Hill takes us on a journey through the collection of books which inhabit her house and through her life of reading. She decides to buy no new books for a whole year and to read or re-read only those that she already owns. Among the many authors discussed are Charles Dickens,Thomas Hardy,George Eliot,Virginia Woolf,Anthony Trollope ect. Of more modern writers Graham Greene,Elizabeth Bowen,Raymond Chandler and P.G.Wodehouse.By the end she lists the forty books which she feels are the very best of them all. ( )

I imagine anyone who belongs to LT will enjoy a book about books. Susan Hill’s very personal graze around her library is engaging and quickly commands everything else to be pushed aside whilst you glut on it. One of the most intriguing results being the places of utter harmony and those of unexpected disagreement. More potent when the writer of the book on books is one you admire perhaps. Our main place of dispute would be over 'David Copperfield' – it seems he won’t be read again by Hill, where I hope to consume it more than once more. Though reading her chapters on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, and that on Bruce Chatwin was like a double take, were these my words, had I written them myself, because they felt like mine!

There were books I read I nodded in agreement with, and many I have been planning to read that she has made me want to pull nearer to the top of the TBR file, or fly to Amazon and drop in my basket. It has also made me want to re-read some of her own novels, many last read with pleasure in the 80’s, and pick up a more recent one to see what she is up to now. She is one of those writers whose work I gorged on in the beginning, and kept collecting, but have not revisited for some while, until now. Treats ahead. ( )