This is a book that will be appreciated, I think, by people who own a lot of books. They will find it familiar. I certainly do - the time spent looking for a particular book, the realisation that you've had this other book for ten years and still not got around to reading it, the desire to have more and more books while that pile of owned/unread teeters even higher, and the constant rereading of old favourites...

Hill, in search of a book, gives herself a challenge: to spend a year reading (or rereading) the books she already has. She can't get through all of them. There's not even a hope of that. Rather it is an excavation of the near and existing, a recollection of what each volume means to her and the possibilities inherent between covers. It's an interesting journey - but then it's always interesting, I think, to see what authors read. To be honest, of Hill's work, prior to this, I have only read the wonderfully good ghost story The Woman in Black, so I had few if any preconceptions of her reading bent, but still. It continues to astonish me that anyone feels this deeply about Virginia Woolf. It does not astonish me that anyone feel this deeply about Charles Dickens... but that Gormenghast, that most Dickensian of fantasies, remains on her unread list, does. Then of course there is the winnowing down: if you could only read forty books for the rest of your life, what would they be? Hill's list is very different to mine, and she does not take Bleak House, but her observations that our own literary histories are as unique as fingerprints, as DNA, is both delightful and true, so I shall not look too askance.