Books are the mind's ballast, for so many of us--the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old age fear is not being able to read--the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.

Helen read a great deal. The feel of a book in her hands was an ancient solace -- not, originally, because of what lay between the covers but as a screen, a defence, a shield.

I can admire, but I no longer covet. Books of course are another matter; books are not acquisitions, they are necessities.

Early reading is serendipitous, and rightly so. Gloriously so. Libraries favor serendipity, invite it; the roaming along a shelf, eyeing an unfamiliar name, taking this down, then that--oh, who's this? Never heard of her--give her a go? That is where, and how, you learn affinity and rejection. You find out what you like by exploring what you do not.

Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person's understanding; reading everything else, I am travelling--I am travelling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn't known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

A great library is anything and everything. It is not for its current custodians to judge what the future will find to be of importance, and it is this eclecticism that gives it the mystique, that is the wonder of it.

Any book represents effort, struggle, work--I know, I write them myself--every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal.

Helen, marvelling at Joyce's capacity for self-protection, often wondered at her choice of career. It had something to do with order, she decided; Joyce mistrusted books for their content, but liked the way they could be marshalled. The readers were simply an unlooked-for hazard.