Chapter Five

There are many different sorts of books, if you know what I mean by that.

Not as in fiction, non-fiction, romances, fantasy, biography, and so on. That's convenient enough for libraries or even personal collections of books, but it is admittedly rather unimaginative. It would be like sorting people by height, weight, hair colour and so on. However useful that might be in certain instances, it doesn't tell you a damn thing about the person themselves. I mean winter books and summer books and books best read alone and books that are best if read to you and books you share only with your closest friends and books that you're quite certain only you rightly understand.

Take The Wind in the Willows, for instance, or the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dickens and Tolstoy. Even though the first on the list begins in spring, you feel instinctively upon opening it that it would be better read in winter, while with the others it's clear that they're made to be enjoyed by a crackling fire when it's cold as death outside and the snow is softly falling.

P.G.Wodehouse's books are ideal for summer holidays, spread out in the grass under a particularly shady tree when there's a breeze in the air. Same goes for Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat, or pretty well anything by L.M. Montgomery.

Take a look outside, and see what reading material would best complement your state of mind and the present climate. Is there a thunderstorm in your head, even though it may be a fine day? Is the suffocating heat or bone-chilling cold threatening to strip the brisk autumn air out of your thoughts? I pity you then. There are times when I marvel that anybody could hate to read, and times when settling down with a book seems an impossible task.

I'd recommend The Last Bookaneer and Between the Lines for nearly everyone who enjoys reading. Books that are about books might fatigue some, for good reasons or otherwise, but I'll always find them brilliant.

Perhaps I ought to sleep. It's all well and good to call books your air and food and blood, to compare reading to intimate conversation with a close friend, and say that you'd sooner read than sleep any day of the year, but in practice the poetry tends to fade quickly.