Howards End could be on your landing

So here's where it gets even more interesting, because perhaps the best way to use the gift of a book like Howards End is on the Landing is not only for the sheer pleasure of reading about someone else's bookish life but also as an ongoing resource for reflection; after you've turned the final page and marveled at the excitement of those shelves of treasures various, time to sit down and marvel at your own.
It's a book that certainly made me reflect on my own reading life so I went out for the Howards End is on the Landing walk to do just that and it took me two hours of steady striding to work it all out
As I leaned on this gate and looked at the world on my doorstep...

...well, I was actually stung by a wasp, but once I'd got over the indignity of that and could concentrate again I realised that for all of us that reading life holds many other things of interest too and that Susan would probably be the first to agree that you don't have to be a famous writer to reflect on a lifetime's reading. Anyone can do it whenever they choose, OK you might not have met Ian Fleming leaning against a mantelpiece at a party, but I met Phil from Eastenders at a petrol station once, that was exciting.
Everyone's list will be different and unique for its own special reasons, its own life experiences, for its own important memories and no less valid for that.
Perhaps there are some of you, like me, who have reached this certain age in a bit of a panic at how much reading 'catch up' you are immersed in. I've yet to read Daniel Deronda once let alone three times and so perhaps we do look as if we are reading a lot of books right now, though I am incapable of speed reading I am reassured to know that I am not the book-blogger mentioned in the book
'who boasts of getting through twenty books plus, a week'.
But sadly I am one of those people who stamps any book I've read, scribbled in and written about here, with my mark of possession...

The Kayaker brought this back from his last trip to Uganda where it was carved by hand by a local craftsman and I'm very sentimental about it...and he's bringing me back another one from this trip which I'll be sentimental about too.
I was reading a great piece entitled Reviewing the Reviewers recently.
It popped up in the Literary Review of Canada and, though I go to great lengths here to distance myself from any assertion that I am a book 'reviewer', I was interested to read why Linda Hutcheon feels that so many of us 'modern humans' are out there trying to talk about books and I think she has hit the nail on the proverbial.
Plenty of us have been educated in the art of what is known in the NHS as 'reflective practice'.
All nurses registered with the NMC here in the UK are required to maintain a portfolio of reflective practice, that method of analysing what has happened, reframing it as a learning experience in a day's work.
Right so we all groan and dread the day our portfolios are called in but I've done it frequently when faced with a challenging situation. Many of us in all walks of life have become familiar with this process and the knock on effect for me is to want to write about what I've read, try and pin

down what that experience has given me and I consider myself very fortunate, nay blessed that others choose to read it here, because for several years it all went in journals that never saw the light of day.
Susan Hill quotes from a book by David Cecil, Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology and I want it... well, actually I've ordered it already for 1p on Amazon.
Here's what David Cecil says about literary criticism,

'the aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible.'

Susan of course does this time and again throughout her book, the illuminations are sometimes dazzling, the insights often whispering gently and thoughtfully whilst always remembering David Cecil's assertion.

'...you cannot force taste on someone else, you cannot argue people into enjoyment.'

My Final Forty would be very different to Susan's because I would almost certainly have some contemporary fiction in there, at least this week I think I would...who knows about next week.
An intrinsic aspect of this late-flowering stage of my reading life has been the ability to read something of the moment and feel fairly sure it will stay by me. Susan's list contains very little contemporary fiction, possible John McGahern's Amongst Women the most recent, published in 1990. W.G.Sebald is much praised in the book but doesn't make the final cut, I suspect because of his inherent inducement to that state of melancholy.
I would take Wolf Hall to the moon and back for its ability to transport me effortlessly to another time and place and to always remind me of the summer of 09, my first spent willingly cut adrift from the NHS since I was eighteen.
The Music Room by William Fiennes, I doubt I would ever tire of reading of the familial love and devotion expressed therein.
Could I manage without something by Margaret Atwood, or A.S.Byatt?
I don't think so, but I quickly realised that reading choices are also tied up with unique and very special reading memories for every one of us, so the thinking trail began in earnest on the Howards End is on the Landing Walk and so it will continue for years to come.
Your lists will be different again to mine making this book a fantastic and lasting catalyst for readers to reflect on their own reading, debate it all endlessly and perhaps write about it if they don't already.
So Howard's End is on the Landing packs that double explosion of sparks, not only will you have read a great book but perhaps like me it will light the blue touch paper for you too and set you thinking about defining and revisiting those blessed favourites of your own.