National Book Lovers Day

 National Book Lovers Day

For all book worms this is quite definitely your day. It is hard to quantify just what proportion of the world will take themselves off to a quiet corner of their room and  carefully open the first thrilling pages of a paperback, hardback, Kindle or, preferably, a book that is quite obviously absorbing and a compulsive page turner. Sometimes reading can take you to places you would never have imagined possible. But these are our private moments, our chance to discover new worlds, places, peoples, cultures and locations.

The chances are that this morning you've jumped onto your train to work, college or university, flicked admiringly through your latest favourite novelist or genre of a book oblivious to the commuters around you. Let them read their latest science fiction, short story, romance, classic or that memorable tale about one of the innumerable wars that have so grotesquely scarred the globe throughout the ages. You may want to leaf through the updated version of a showbiz celebrity whose lifestyles bear no relation to yours. 

Yes folks. Today is National Book Lovers Day. A vast majority of the population are divided on this subject. You either love reading or you just detest this simple pleasure. Some simply haven't got time to read, can't be bothered or just think it's a complete waste of time. Then there are those who can't get enough of reading and devour books as if they were going out of fashion. It is one of those great preoccupations that takes us away almost completely from the troubles and tragedies of the world around us.

Book lovers, by their very nature, are studious, curious, inquisitive, fascinated, thoughtful and just interested in the way the human race study and analyse, ponder and dwell for a while. We may take ourselves off to local library for hours on end and research material for the book they'd always wanted to write but never thought was within the realms of possibility. So we dig out hefty reference books, encyclopaedias perhaps, maps, genealogy archives in an effort to find out more about our ancestry, our family tree and our historic past.

We've been reading or not reading for almost as long as we can remember. Some of us read almost incessantly during the 1980s because we left school with no qualifications and just wanted to broaden our minds and horizons. So what began as just a way of passing the time became a conquest of the great classics. You read voraciously and almost constantly- well not quite but it seemed like it at the time. You wandered around your library, browsing the shelves and just opening your mind to literary brilliance.

It seemed to start with the great German writer Thomas Mann and then made a logical progression to any classic book that presented what seemed like a daunting challenge at the time. And yet it wasn't at all. Then you found yourself in your local WH Smith and startled by the sheer volume and size of some of the greatest pieces of literature ever seen. Once you'd developed a habit for reading you simply couldn't stop yourself. Then your eye was taken by the incomparable Thomas Hardy. It was a seminal moment for yours truly.

At school you'd read a book devoted to Hardy's love poems and probably thought nothing of it at the time. But this was a huge, thick volume of four of Hardy's most descriptive, illustrative novels ever written. There were well over 1,000 pages in this mighty tome and the book had to be bought. So you began Far From the Madding Crowd and couldn't take your eyes off the plot, the gorgeous language, the vivid imagery, the word paintings and the purple prose.

So you read and read and read and you were hooked for life. Hardy represented some of the most magical lyricism and heartfelt story telling you'd ever read. You began with Somerset Maugham, both his delightful short stories and novels. Maugham wrote simply, with brevity, short, sharp sentences, lovely descriptions of the Borneo rainforest, plantation officers, well defined characters with eccentric lifestyles, islands and stunning sunsets, tropical paradises and words that carried you away to distant lands.

Now you found yourself in the wonderful world of Charles Dickens, surely one of the most remarkable story tellers of all time, an anecdotalist of the highest order. Dickens pushed back the frontiers, broke new ground and then indulged himself with the kind of social commentary that made for compelling reading. Dickens wrote about Victorian poverty, squalor, feuding families, whimsical characters that almost leapt off the page and held your interest for hours on end. He wrote penetratingly about the class system, dotty aristocrats, comic figures, chimney sweeps, costermongers and legal companies.

Then you thrilled to the elegant high society novels of Henry James, the bold and buccaneering seafaring tales on the boiling oceans as illustrated by Joseph Conrad. There was Rudyard Kipling and DH Lawrence who was controversial, outrageously offensive and morally questionable, an author who broke down all the sexual boundaries with the kind of licentious language that would never be tolerated by any reader who just wanted to be entertained without any sex in their books.

You now discovered HG Wells, a man who some believed, gave the world a pessimistic, dystopian vision of the future and presented science fiction in vivid, at times shocking detail. The Time Machine and War of the Worlds ensured both Wells celebrity and notoriety. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Leo Tolstoy provided you with quite the most astonishing stories ever told. Both seemed to last for ever. Proust's glorious evocation of nostalgia and the French bourgeoisie was spread over three mammoth volumes running to well over 3,000 pages in all. Tolstoy's unforgettable War and Peace spanned a vast panorama of Russian battlefields and an intricate tapestry of generals, soldiers, heroes and one of the most turbulent periods in Russian history. 

But here was my relationship with the world of books. More or less the whole of the 1980s were spent swotting diligently and gaining a much clearer understanding of a world hidden away intriguingly on the pages of the memorable classics. On reflection it probably gave me a very revealing insight into the world of the leading authors of both the 19th and 20th century. 

And so we move into the world of Kindle, an electronic device designed to take away some of the hassle involved in turning the pages of a book hoping that you won't lose your place. For years the act of folding a corner of any book remains problematic since you become very wary of missed pages but then slightly conscious of its pristine condition. 

So the world of publishing remains ever so slightly mysterious, the buying and selling of books still a hugely popular activity and libraries are still open and available to those who just want to find that elusive book that will tick all the right boxes, books that are both informative, amusing and enlightening. The bigger books you'd like to read but haven't got the time for continue to be there at your disposal. The days when libraries used to keep disciplined rows of ticket boxes with your name and address, now seem prehistoric but please enjoy National Book Lovers Day and be sure to cherish your bookshelves. Happy Reading.