I have read at least five thousand books in my lifetime.
They have educated and humanised me.
I have walked this earth in a hundred pairs of others’ shoes.
I have seen the world, with its joys, wonders, sorrows, beauties, adventures, pains and evils through a thousand pairs of eyes.
My own experiences, all more intense and deeper through reading, have been immeasurably enriched.
I have been inducted into the great conversation of humankind. This carries all the ideas, thoughts, stories, arguments, explanations, flights of fancy, jokes, conceits, confessions, accusations, exaltations that have ever been said or thought.
I have not always been a good reader.
Arriving in England at almost seven I was fluent in three spoken languages but only had rudimentary reading and writing skills in French.
I was a slower reader in my primary class of 44 children.
My mother Elna took me in hand– In three months of guided reading she led me to be one of the strongest readers in the class
Since then, books have been part of my secret, inner life.
Looking back, it is interesting how my taste expanded from the books I was given at home, via the children’s library, including children’s of versions Dickens, to the adult world of books
One early interest was comics. I remember the Sun, Comet, Dandy, Beano, Lion, Eagle, Hotspur, Radio Fun, the Beezer and Wham. Then came Classic Comics. I read Crime & Punishment, Lorna Doone, some Dickens, White Fang, and others retelling classics with pictures. Plus, Batman, Superman, Captain America, Then the 60s comics, Dr Strange, Silver Surfer, Robert Crumb, even Tijuana Bibles. All of which led to graphic novels.
I loved the Arkwright Road children’s library in Hampstead. It had a separate entrance and was downstairs on the right. I lived at 13-15 Frognal from 1956-61 so as a child the library was just around the corner from me. I was an avid reader. I discovered and read the Just William series (Richmal Crompton), RM Ballantine, children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe & Treasure Island. Also, Biggles (and Gimlet and Worrall) by Capt. W. E. Johns. I tried Bunter and Jennings but did not really like them. Too public schooly. Same with the Famous Five and Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome) which just didn’t grab me. I did read children’s versions of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, the Greek Myths, and some fairy tales, Heidi and the Alice books, Swiss Family Robinson.
At some point I graduated to the adult library upstairs, and read thrillers like those of John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, and Ian Fleming. I also read HG Wells, Jules Verne and early Sci-Fi. In my mid-teens I read all I could of Hemingway, Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Jack London. Plus, seminal books like 1984, Brave New World as well as To kill a mockingbird. I love funny books like Cold Comfort Farm, Spike Milligan, Edward Lear, Three Men in Boat, The Diary of a Nobody, although I did not read them all then. Jonathon Swift, Rabelais, Sterne, Donleavy, Wilde also funny but not so laugh out loud.
By the time I was eighteen I was studying science but reading James Joyce, Kerouac, Beat Poets like Ginsburg and Corso. I also read Dante, Plato, William Burroughs, some Rimbaud, Baudelaire, St John Perse, Jean Cocteau and contemporary poetry. I struggled with Beckett, Bertrand Russell, David Hume.
Hampstead Public Library in Arkwright Road also had a record library near the front on the right. I explored the worlds of classical music. Bach, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. Also Stravinsky and other Russians like Mussorgsky and Khachaturian. I borrowed LPs, blew my mind with their music, but was brought back down earth as the records were inspected on return for new scratches. However, I always treated records and books with respect and awe, so never had to pay for damage. Only now after many years do I have the audacity to annotate sacred books when they are my own!
I carried on reading fiction and science fiction for years, plus pulp authors like Mickey Spillane. I had a spate of 18th century authors like Smollett, Richardson, Laurence Sterne. Also Rabelais, Milton, Piers Plowman, Beowulf, Icelandic Sagas, Blake. Dabbled with mystical texts like Cloud of Unknowing, St John of the Cross, Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Later, in the 1960s, books on the Mandala, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufi wisdom, Zen, Kabbalah, Magick and the works of Aleister Crowley. Two books that affected me deeply were Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
I had a spate of reading everything by Evelyn Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, William Golding, and John Masters epic novels of the Savage family in India over 300 years from Coromandel to Bhowani Junction. So many, many more, now forgotten. And how could I forget Kipling’s Kim, and Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Cherry Apsley-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World and Alexandra Neel’s tales of Tibet.
There have been some difficult reads like Finnegan’s Wake which I have read bits of many times; Woolf’s The Waves in which I couldn’t get a purchase on the ‘characters’, Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn which disgusted me too much, and I never could read plays by the Ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Goethe, even though I have seen them on stage. I just managed to read Brecht’s Galileo play. Some books I ground to a halt in the middle like Midnight’s Children (although I have enjoyed other Rushdie books since), One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Book of Disquiet, Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete. There’s no shame in moving away if the magnet fails to hold.
I have read and appreciated masses of genre fiction. Genres I have loved include the following.
Science fiction with authors like A C Clark, Isaac Asimov, Aldiss, Bester, Dick, Vonnegut, Lem and early works such as M P Shiel, David Lindsay and Olaf Stapledon from the 1920s and 30s.
Fantasy and horror including Tolkien, Stephen Donaldson, H P Lovecraft, Ursula LeGuin.
Hard boiled crime including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Ed Bunker, James Ellroy and many lesser writers. Just yesterday I downloaded all I could find of Patricia Highsmith.
Historical fiction including Nigel Tranter (Robert the Bruce), Josephine Tey, Robert Graves, Robert Harris (including the marvellous Cicero trilogy), CS Forester, and so on.
Autobiographical fiction and ‘romans a clef’ including Proust, Anthony Powell, Knausgaard (It took me years to finish Proust because I kept starting again at Swann’s Way. But then I just carried on and finished it in a year).
Auto/biographies by Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell, Dennis Norden, Aleister Crowley, William Burroughs, Paul McCartney, Spike Milligan, Robert Graves and other memorable lives now forgotten.
Transgressive fiction including Henry Miller, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Burroughs, Rechy (City of Night, which led me to the poem City of Dreadful Night), Lydia Lunch, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ Étranger, and more.
Later, I finally read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov after 30 years of recommendations by Jill and loved it. I did not read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky until nearing my 40s, in the late 1970s and 1980s and was swept away by the vast vistas of steppes and plumbing the depths of the soul. Two years ago, I read Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman which was moving. Another Russian great, if not quite as great. And The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien, which I found to be very good
Ahh … The world of books … And we have not even gone into non-fiction. So many, so many!
Recently I read Jeremy Lent – The Patterning Instinct, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow, and I’m halfway through The Master and his emissary, by Ian Gilchrist. Each is a mind-blowing big history of humanity. In order, from cognitive & social, societal, psychological/brain-based perspectives.
By the 1970s the main branch of the Hampstead Public Libraries in Arkwright Road was closed and turned into an arts centre. The library itself had moved to a new building at Swiss Cottage. As part of the LCC/GLC London scheme it specialised in psychology and philosophy, which was useful for me as I started my PhD in 1974. I worked on it in London from 1974-79, becoming a school maths teacher to support my family and start my career. Then I became lecturer in mathematics education living first near Cambridge during 1979-1982, then in Kingston, Jamaica from 1982-84, and then finally moving to Exeter from 1984 onwards. I was based here when my PhD was finally awarded in 1985. It was called Meaning and Intension in Mathematics, a work in the philosophy of mathematics. and mathematical logic.
For my studies and work I read widely in the philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, history of science and mathematics, epistemology, mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Among the better-known key authors for me now are Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, and recently I have been reading on dialectics and its relevance to mathematics. As well as reading ethics and moral philosophy. But that’s my daytime reading, as opposed to my nighttime leisure reading. I have a love hate relationship with Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, Serres, Guattari, Lacan, and other French philosophers. Of these I got the most out of Foucault whose work is momentous.
Most of my favourite authors happened to be male, although also I love Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Kate Atkinson, Elif Shafak, and loads of female poets as well as Hanna Arendt and Judith Butler plus others’ names forgotten or dotted throughout this account.
Ahhh … Books, books, books …
Even in this big list (and growing bigger every time I reread and can’t resist adding to it), I have forgotten hundreds of authors and thousands of books that I have read. If I kept writing for a year I would doubtless come up with another book and author every day. For example, yesterday I added the section on genres in fiction. This morning something on difficult reads. Time to stop. Too many sweet sultanas and prunes (and bitter almonds) will spoil the cake. In the final analysis, long lists are boring.
I have barely listed poetry. But in the past ten years Jill and I have been part of a poetry reading group that meets every three weeks and we have explored literally hundreds of poets from Sappho to Bob Dylan, stopping several times at Eliot, Auden, Yeats. Another strand of joy from books and reading.
I collect some books but try to get rid of some too. I keep them if they are beautiful editions; if they were special to me; if they are antique and leather bound, especially if printed before 1800, and they have those long ‘S’ letters, like a mathematical integral sign; if they are art books or other illustrated non-fiction or fiction (such as the Dali illustrated Don Quixote); if I plan to read them or might refer to them some day; or if I prize them for any other reason (like my copy of the Tao Te King in a Penguin edition in which I wrote poems in the 1960s). I also collect miniature books and have ten versions of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, from a 50p coin sized one to large versions illustrated by Edmund Dulac.
I love books and have loved books all my life. They have made me who I am and opened up a world of feelings and horizons on others’ experience, wound into my own, into myself.
Ahh, books, a lifetime of romance with books, reading, writing, the feel and smell of books. Not so much the latter now for new books as I’ve gone digital, reading fiction on my kindle, although the walls here are still lined with books. We have at least 40 shelves of books – not counting the shelves and piles of books in Jill’s own study. I was in my university office recently – they asked me to vacate 2 years ago – it’s going slowly – brought home another box of books and papers. I have already dumped thousands of books and journals over the years as I’ve shifted offices downwards, smaller offices, less books, papers. My office is the only one occupied in a decayed corridor of an old building on campus. They used to call this corridor The Departure Lounge because it was final office space for retirees, emeritus professors like me. I’m the last one hanging on. I took early retirement in 2005, then part-time teaching for 4 years, seeing master’s and doctoral students through. I guess I’m still an ‘ornament to the institution’ as I remain active in international circles. They have been so tolerant but it’s time to let the room go, abandon the bags of mathematical solids, Dienes’ blocks, slide rules, drawers of OHPs (overhead projector slides). I switched to PowerPoint presentations, reluctantly in 2011 after I turned up in Greece with my OHPs to give a plenary lecture. They said no, horrified, and converted my talk into PPT, and I have never looked back.
I’m abandoning my Vance Packard, Sociology Readers, Algebra books, popular expositions of maths (1,2,3 … Infinity – Gamow), too many others to recall or list, hundreds of copies of the last journals I kept (For the Learning of Maths, Humanistic Maths Journal) and more, more, more in the office, to be junked, pulped. No-one values old books or journals anymore.
I ought to thin down the books I keep at home too, because too many shelves are stuffed and overflowing, and there are too many piles of books on the floor. We once let our daughters choose from five hundred discards and they chose 350 books to keep. We were delighted. “But how will you remove them” we asked? “Oh, no, we’ll store them here”.
I don’t bring home books from charity shops anymore unless they are tiny ones for my collection of miniature books or something irresistibly beautiful and useful (William Morris, Walter Pater not yet named. Nor Berenson, true life art critic in The Personal Librarian).
I still publish journal papers, book chapters, even whole books as well as fun pieces such as I’ve seen things, and I have loved in the International Times last month. Good company to publish in.
Ahh books! I have had a lifelong love affair with text and books. Ever faithful books never empty of their wisdom and joy! Always a comfort and enlivening, taking you out of yourself to share the knowledge, stories and experiences of the whole of humankind. The endless conversation. It’s free to join. In fact, like it or not, you’re already in it!
Some of my smallest books, Rubaiyat open at the first page
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Paul Ernest
17 June 2025, Exeter
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