My mum studied English Literature at university, like me, and her bookshelves are less of a collection and more of a mini library. Most of what I’ve borrowed from it I have never returned (sorry mum!) These books now live on my bedside tables in two piles: read, and to be read.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was one of the first books I borrowed, arguably starting it all. My mum bought her copy in the late 1990s, when it first came out, and it now sits on my bookshelf alongside the rest of the series, reread so profusely over the years. The wizarding world is probably where my love of literature began; it was vivid enough to escape into, and it contained Hermione, the overachieving bookworm I saw myself in.
When I was choosing a coursework book for A-Level English Literature, my mum suggested The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne Bronte refuses to romanticise themes of alcoholism and abuse: Helen Graham tells her story through her own diary and leaves her abusive husband to protect both her young son and herself. The novel was so radical that it was suppressed after Anne’s death by her own sister, Charlotte. As a lover of feminist literature, it became one of my all-time favourite books and led to me buying my own Penguin hardback.
When I picked up Mrs Dalloway, blue biro flooded the margins of most pages. They were filled with underlined words and asterisks leading to blank pages at the front, purely because my mum had so much to say. Most of it is utterly illegible, but it didn’t matter; you can’t not read a book that heavily annotated. What I found was a novel that, despite taking place over the course of only one day, manages to deeply explore complex themes of human consciousness and time, with the stream of consciousness style immersing readers into the characters’ minds.
My mum spent years trying to convince me to read Hamnet, but I only picked it up before the film was released into cinemas. Maggie O’Farrell’s vividly lyrical prose devastated me with the use of present tense trapping me in Agnes’ all-consuming grief.
I promise I’ll return the books eventually, (sorry again mum!) though probably now with a few annotations of my own.
“Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by drewesque is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
