Every Book Has It's Day

Last year I finally read Jonathon Strange and Dr.Norrell. No Doubt everybody else read this book years ago when it was new and fresh, but for me it has been there, on the shelf, patiently waiting for its time to be read. One afternoon, feeling bereaved after finishing Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, I wanted something else that was magical to read and there it was just waiting for me. I quickly became entranced by the description of the magic of York Minster because I’d just been there the week before. I was then sucked in by the strange man with cotton candy grey hair who dressed beautifully but seemed to appear and disappear at will. By the time I was in Venice, a city I've always wanted to visit, I couldn't put it down until I finished. Why had I not read it before?

Books have their time. When we buy them doesn't really count because we may not be ready for them. A friend who lines books up chronologically and ploughs through them, worries that his wife buys books and then leaves them on the shelf and she tells him she will read them, just at the right time. I am the same. I have tried to pick them up before maybe, but they haven’t clicked and something stops me reading on. I choose to think it is some kind of book fairy who knows that now is not the time for me to get the most or the best out of them.

Another book I was like this with was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. On the face of it this was a book that tailor made for me, taking in different countries, complex family relationships and all narrated by a hermaphrodite. I have a huge interest in disability, sexuality, and all forms of difference so when it came out I bought it immediately. Sadly, it languished on the shelf through three house moves before I finally read it. I had been doing a year of ‘Gothic, Grotesque and Monstrous’ literature at university when it first came into paperback and I simply couldn't be bothered with another story of difference. I’d done all the classics; Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde and was up to my ears in vampyres, werewolves, spirits, Golems, freaks and seal boys! At that point the thought of anything remotely ‘other’ was overload and I turned towards more African and Caribbean literature. Then suddenly, three house moves later I had a quiet summer and decided to give it another try. I was lost in a deckchair for at least a week, with this tale of a brother and sister who escape a Greek war to come into the United States as husband and wife. This secret is carried over three generations to our narrator who has been brought up a girl but is simply unsure that is what she is. I couldn't believe I’d never read this before and kept popping into my husband’s study in wonder to tell him that this book had been on the shelf all the time and it was a perfect fit. Would it have been a perfect fit at any other time?

I have a theory that a book finds you when you are ready for it. You may eye it up in the book shop for weeks, or even have it on your book shelf gathering dust. It may have been a book you were forced to read at school or university, but when the pressure is off and years later you find it again and it can touch you differently to when you first read it. My obvious example of this was Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In my teens I loved wild and romantic Cathy, but now I see the Cathy and Heathcliff relationship as dangerous and abusive. Whereas once Jane Eyre was boring for rejecting Rochester’s offer of being his mistress I now see her as strong, true to herself and a great example of knowing who you are as a woman.

More recently I saw that the BBC were doing an adaptation of Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. This book had sat on my shelves for a couple of years when I’d bought it along with some Sarah Water’s fiction about Victorian England with a twist. I had even picked it up a couple of times and something stopped me connecting with it. I decided to give it another go before the series really got underway and was immediately entranced by Sugar, the prostitute who writes out her anger in a violent novel of murder and revenge. I couldn't believe I hadn't read this before. It was a masterpiece of a novel, showing three woman who actually have more power and strength than they might have believed possible. I loved the descriptions, the frankness and the humour. It was a book that was made for me and again I had a little sense of loss at the end when I had to let Sugar go into her new adventure with her child in tow. I loved the series equally even though, by then, I was so in love with most of the characters I couldn't imagine anyone getting it right.

A book is not something to get through or past before picking up the next one. For me it is a world to immerse yourself in; if it is written well that is. Sometimes, I know why a book has had to wait. It might be that my own experience is too close to the story and I can’t let go of my own narrative. It might be that it seems heavy and I can’t feel in the mood for it because I don’t feel well, or I am wrestling with some difficult stuff at work and want little more than pure escapism. That’s the good thing about books, there’s one for every occasion. However, nothing beats the joy of escaping into a rich world of characters who have an incredible story to tell.