Roddy Doyle

William Boyd

Philip Pullman

Pico Iyer

Chigozie Obioma

Candice Carty-Williams

Robert Macfarlane

Jackie Morris

Imtiaz Dharker

Andy Miller

Jennie Orchard

The Gifts of Reading

Celeste Richardson

In the spirit of the title, our amazing co-blogger TS decided to send all of us at Novel Notions a copy of The Gifts of Reading. The entire idea of this book is lovely. Here is a collection of essays about the joys of giving and receiving stories, written by those who craft stories for a living. In some cases, it’s about books or authors who had some sort of profound effect on the essayist. In all cases, it was lovely to see the magic of the written word through the eyes of others, and to see how much it means to this each individual making up this host of writers. The first essay is Robert Macfarlane’s eponymous “The Gifts of Reading.” Macfarlane has a truly beautiful way with words. It’s the only essay in the collection that I had read previously, and I can see how it inspired the idea behind this book.

William Boyd, in his essay “Some Observations on Giving Books,” says the following: “Books can help you endure the most dire and inhuman of circumstances…” The situations he used as examples were mostly of those imprisoned, but this is something I’ve found to be true time and again in my life, when I was going through difficult times. This entire essay resonated strongly with me, and is among my favorites in the collection. As much as it was about the joy of giving books, it was also about what books, especially fiction, give us back. And the following quote sounded like it came from my own mind:
“But of all the people I’ve given books to over the years there is one person who is the wholehearted, uncontested beneficiary of my book-giving largesse. Me. I give myself books all the time, almost every day, in moments of book-obsession, book-need. Let’s be honest: book-addiction.”
He ended the essay with this lovely sentiment: “When you give someone a book you are making a present of part of yourself.”

Another of my favorite essays in this collection is Jackie Morris’s “Intimate Relations,” in part of which she details her relationship with books as a child and the very different relationship with books she made sure to foster in her own children. I loved the way she detailed reading to and with her children, and how that fostered a love of reading on their own. But this essay was also about being profoundly touched by a poem, about using whatever creative arts you have to fight for important things, and about how one of those important things is the public library as an institution.

David Pilling’s entry, “The Man I Was,” might be my absolute favorite essay I’ve ever read. He housed his book-giving within the framework of some fictional apocalypse, when he was leaving his five favorite books out for someone to find, along with an explanation of why he loved them. This was assuming that the world lasted long enough for someone to find the hastily gift-wrapped stack of books next to his rotting corpse. The framework was equal parts sad and hilarious, but the messages inside that framework, about which books he loved enough to leave out for others and why he chose them, was thoughtful and profound. It was a perfect blend of humor and philosophical musings, and I thought it was positively brilliant.

I absolutely love what SF Said has to say about the importance of children’s books, and how subversive they can truly be if you look beneath the surface. In his essay, “The Best Gifts You Can Give,” he stated: “This is what children’s literature is all about. It can express the biggest ideas in forms so beautifully simple that anyone can not only grasp them, but come to live by them, because they take up residence at your very core.” I found this sentiment incredibly lovely, and true. And the books Said chose! Some of these are among my own favorites, and I loved hearing exactly how they had impacted this author’s life and work.

The final essay in the book, Markus Zusak’s “The Will of Stories,” was by far one of the shortest in the collection. It was one of the few, if not the only, essay to not drop book titles throughout. And yet, it was a delight to read. There’s something about his writing style that is beautifully unique, and even in the few short pages of this essay, that style shone.

This collection as a whole was lovely. I can’t say that I adored every single essay, but there were some that I loved deeply. And even those that didn’t resonate with me still provided food for thought. If you’re a lover of books, and believe that reading is a gift best enjoyed when shared with others, this collection of essays should be on your shelves. And on the shelves of those who have fostered that love in your life, or shared that love with you in any way. It makes a truly wonderful gift.

The Gifts of Reading

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