The Secret Life of Books

    "Your books reveal who you are. To display them where other people can see them is to exhibit a particular version of your self. Maybe you curate this version carefully, putting your 'best' books in the most visible places. Or maybe you stack your books up any which way - the bibliographical equivalent of going out in tracksuit bottoms without shaving. Either way, your books, like your clothes [...] are sending messages about you. In fact, our books actually reveal more about us than our appearance, because they are the visible markers of an inner life."

    I greatly enjoyed Tom Mole's The Secret Life of Books, a clear and thoughtful examination of the wider world of books and our relationship to them. Informed by professional expertise, Tom's perceptive observations range across the book as object, how they respond to changes in technology, and how they are woven into our lives. However we treat them, house them, use them, their function goes far beyond that of mere 'container', rather signifying many things both personal and universal.

    In a section on book clubs, but surely just as relevant to book blogs, Tom Mole says the following:

    " So one of the things that books do for us is to help us move between being together and being alone. Often when we read a great book, one of our first impulses is to tell others how great it was, to make them read it too, to enlarge the set of people we know who share this particular knowledge, this particular experience. We want to stop being alone with the book and start being together with others who have encountered it. And yet that sharing is a strange sort of communion. Book clubs bring people together to share an experience that each of them had alone."

    I'd never thought of it in quite those terms before, but that's the charm of Tom's book - he makes us look at something we almost take for granted and see it in a new and precious light.

Comments

[callmemadam]

I see you have The Little Bookroom there. What a lovely book it is.

What Tom Mole says about sharing is so true. I'm always thrilled when I recommend a book and someone says, 'Thank you, I loved it.' Perhaps we should thank our fellow book bloggers more often.