Description

Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi s enchanting Books and Roses ); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Elizabeth McCracken s eccentric library did not happen in real life - even down to the murder; and it is rumoured that on 3 June 1997 the British Museum Reading Room really was visited by the ghost of Max Beerbohm s obscurest of poets, Enoch Soames... Fiction and reality merge in Cortazar s A Continuity of Parks . Characters step out of their books in Fay Weldon s Lily Bart s Hat Shop , while Jasper Fforde s Jurisfiction operatives enter Wuthering Heights to deliver a Rage-Counselling session. Charles Lamb muses on the annoying book-borrowing habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the teenage Teffi is overawed by Tolstoy; Helene Hanff in Manhattan launches her famous correspondence with a London antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road. Reading, as the Queen informs an appalled private secretary, is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting . And also, of course, a lot of fun. Sit comfortably, then, and begin.

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