Inspiring Older Readers
Scribbles In The Margins by Daniel Gray
I think the strapline of this book – ’50 Eternal Delights of Books’ – gives you a pretty good idea that you’re in for a mellow and relaxing read if you slip this compact little hardback into your pocket or handbag for a journey or those times when you have minutes to kill and concentration on something more taxing might be an issue.
Taking his inspiration from J.B. Priestley’s own little book of uplift that he called ‘Delights’, Daniel Gray has put together a clutch of very short two or three page essays about those aspects of reading and books that all of us experience at one time or another. I zoomed through the fifty entries looking for some aspect of the reading and book owning experience he’d missed and really couldn’t come up with one. That’s not to say I agree with everything he’s got to say here and I really wouldn’t expect to. Little musings of this kind are necessarily idiosyncratic – I, for example, wouldn’t for a minute go along with the ‘romance’ of reading under canvas while camping. What could be more depressing? Still, he thinks not and that’s fine.
You will almost certainly find yourself nodding knowingly at his views on some things and even laughing out loud at others. I was particularly pleased with the way he identified reading in bed as a luxurious sanctuary from whatever the real world wanted to throw at you – it’s been one of my survival tactics for a long time – and who doesn’t scrutinise the bookshelves of friends and family when you visit their houses. Just imagine the horror of finding that someone you’ve just met has no books or a shelf crammed with Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown……But Gray is much more zen about these things than I am and has a pretty resolute focus on the things that are shared rather than the things that divide.
I don’t think you’ll be able to read this book without finding your own particular behaviour suddenly under, albeit the most gentle, scrutiny somewhere in these pages. And everyone is likely to have their own clutch of little favourites. Mine included those with the following titles: ‘ Losing an afternoon organising bookshelves’, ‘Spying on what others are reading’, ‘The calm a room of books brings’, ‘Escaping into an atlas’.
I couldn’t say with any honesty that this is a book that’s going to make you love books more or change your predilections and I’m not sure that’s the intension. What it will do is to confirm you as a fully paid-up member of the book squad and perhaps give you some comfort that you’re not the only one out there with what, until now, you may have thought of as pretty odd obsessions.
Terry Potter
December 2019