Oxygen Books

The Lady on An Everywhere: a little book about reading: 'breathtaking scope ... intellectual sharpness, emotional honesty and a readable lightness of touch'

AN EVERYWHERE by Heather Reyes (Oxygen Books, £8.99

Taking its title from a line in John Donne’s poem, The Good- Morrow, this quiet but powerful book argues that reading, like love, ‘can make one little room an everywhere’ – that even in the most constrained of circumstances, literature opens up vast landscapes of imaginative possibility. 

Erudite but heartfelt, it celebrates the pleasures and consolations to be found in books, chronicling the author’s reading journey during a period of illness – often confi ned to one room. 

Its breathtaking scope: English and French classics from Montaigne to de Beauvoir, Shakespeare to Woolf; insightful comments about the power of poetry; meditations on travel, libraries, and illness; the relative merits of shopping online and in bookshops – is handled with intellectual sharpness, emotional honesty and a readable lightness of touch. The Lady

Heather Reyes An Everywhere: a little book about reading. We can't believe we made Amazon's top 500 books! (er, sorry indies)

Hi

Thanks to everyone who's bought, reviewed or sold An Everywhere. For such a strange, leftfield title we've been so gratified by the passion and enthusiasm of everyone. 

Yesterday it was in the top 500 books on Amazon UK (hope indie bookshops aren't reading this) and is our bestselling book so far. We're still reeling and just delighted that book buyers like what the Guardian has called a 'love letter to reading' http://gu.com/p/3zfdg/tw 

Thanks once again!

A mini-adventure on every page. An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes.

 

You're probably wondering what Oxygen Books is up to.

After all, with our books on some of the best writing on cities from Berlin to Istanbul, aren't we meant to be the travel-guide-book-with-a-difference-publisher?

Well, yes we are.

But this year we're taking our remit a little bit further - with some other kinds of surprising journeys.

Oxygen's editor and publisher Heather Reyes has written a rather special book about the journeys we all make as readers.

During several months of treatment for a serious illness, she decided to turn a necessary evil into an opportunity: the luxury of reading whatever takes her fancy.

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is a quietly passionate and witty defence of the joys and consolations of reading in both the difficult and day-to-day aspects of our lives.

Orange-prize winning novelist Helen Dunmore has already called it 'a brilliant travel guide to the city of books: the city we hold within us, and the one we share with all its other citizens. I love Heather's passion for reading and the blend of erudition and intimacy.'

Cheryl Moskowitz, children's writer and founder of Lapidus, has praised it as 'a gem of a book, one to read and re-read and to carry around like a bible - not just a guide to great literature but as a reminder that reading is the highest form of religion. Part good-read guide, part travel guide, part memoir, it is a great example of that which it explores, books that can take us anywhere and everywhere.'

If you want to be taken to new and surprising places in your reading (as well as re-discovering some favourite old haunts), here are a thousand and one affirmations and ideas.

The joys of reading are very real ones. An Everywhere: a little book about readingtakes us to the very heart of what reading can be in each of our lives.
 
Heather Reyes is the editor of Oxygen Books' acclaimed city-pick series of urban travel guides and the author of Zade, longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize with Zadie Smith and Joanna Briscoe. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction International, Ambit, Mslexia, Philosophy Now and others. Her new novel, Miranda Road, is published in May 2014

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is published by Oxygen Books on 10 April 2014.
 
You can read an extract here.
 
Find out here about the book's genesis

Available now from all good bookshops and Amazon. Paperback Original £8.99,$11.12, e-book. 

http://www.oxygenbooks.co.uk
 
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecitylitcafe
 

For registered bibliomaniacs only. An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes. Out now.

You're probably wondering what Oxygen Books is up to.

After all, with our books on some of the best writing on cities from Berlin to Istanbul, aren't we meant to be the travel-guide-book-with-a-difference-publisher?

Well, yes we are.

But this year we're taking our remit a little bit further - with some other kinds of surprising journeys.

Oxygen's editor and publisher Heather Reyes has written a rather special book about the journeys we all make as readers.

During several months of treatment for a serious illness, she decided to turn a necessary evil into an opportunity: the luxury of reading whatever takes her fancy.

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is a quietly passionate and witty defence of the joys and consolations of reading in both the difficult and day-to-day aspects of our lives.

Orange-prize winning novelist Helen Dunmore has already called it 'a brilliant travel guide to the city of books: the city we hold within us, and the one we share with all its other citizens. I love Heather's passion for reading and the blend of erudition and intimacy.'

Cheryl Moskowitz, children's writer and founder of Lapidus, has praised it as 'a gem of a book, one to read and re-read and to carry around like a bible - not just a guide to great literature but as a reminder that reading is the highest form of religion. Part good-read guide, part travel guide, part memoir, it is a great example of that which it explores, books that can take us anywhere and everywhere.'

If you want to be taken to new and surprising places in your reading (as well as re-discovering some favourite old haunts), here are a thousand and one affirmations and ideas.

The joys of reading are very real ones. An Everywhere: a little book about readingtakes us to the very heart of what reading can be in each of our lives.
 
Heather Reyes is the editor of Oxygen Books' acclaimed city-pick series of urban travel guides and the author of Zade, longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize with Zadie Smith and Joanna Briscoe. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction International, Ambit, Mslexia, Philosophy Now and others. Her new novel, Miranda Road, is published in May 2014

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is published by Oxygen Books on 10 April 2014.
 
You can read an extract here.
 
Find out here about the book's genesis

Available now from all good bookshops and Amazon. Paperback Original £8.99,$11.12, e-book. 

http://www.oxygenbooks.co.uk
 
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecitylitcafe
 

When you're lying ill in bed, don't knock Amazon: An Everywhere: a little book about reading

 

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, £8.99, Oxygen Books

Amazon has just delivered Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France, the result of fourteen thousand miles of cycling around the country and lots of research. Utterly, utterly fascinating, and one of those books that changes the way you see and understand a country. And his style makes the reading of the book even more of a pleasure: it’s like being in a room with a fascinating, witty and enthusiastic friend, telling you things you’ll never forget because they’re just so darned interesting … like the whistling language (one of France’s many extinct languages and dialects - French was once only spoken by a minority of its citizens) used by shepherds in the mountains, a language so sophisticated that they could communicate, over long distances, the contents of an entire newspaper!

            On finishing the book, I’m so reluctant to part from Graham Robb’s voice that I immediately romp through his appropriately energetic biography of Balzac (I’d loved his books on Rimbaud and Victor Hugo). We hear him on a New York book programme, thanks to the brilliant facility of internet radio. And like him even more. He sounds just as pleasant, witty, unarrogant and interesting as his books. We say we wish we could be his friend … then we realize that we sort of are. It’s a bit of a cliché (it’s been doing the rounds for hundreds of years), but one of the great things about books is that their authors can feel like ‘friends’ - with the advantage of not having to remember their birthdays or feel guilty about not having them to dinner often enough.

 

Next I read a couple of short novels in translation - Soldiers of Salamis, by Javier Cercas, and Heroes Like Us, by Thomas Brussig, then go on to Knut Hamsun’s famous Hunger (which I’m ashamed of not having read before; it was partly the knowledge of his Nazi sympathies that had kept me from it).

Soldiers of Salamis, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (it had won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize 2004) turns on an incident in the Spanish Civil War when a fascist writer (who later becomes a national hero), having escaped a firing squad by fleeing into forest, finds himself looking into the face (and the gun) of one of his Republican pursuers. But instead of killing him, the soldier simply walks away. The story is of the attempt to discover who the compassionate soldier was, why he spared his enemy, and whether he is still alive. Although specifically set in the Spanish Civil War, it moves, like all good fiction, beyond the realms of a specific place and time in what it has to say about human behaviour in general, particularly in the context of war.

Heroes Like Us, translated from the German by John Brownjohn, centres on the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That much I can remember - that and a general ‘flavour’. But when trying to write about it I realise most of it has drained away as if my mind's a colander: just a little over-cooked cabbage left at the bottom. Virtually no recollection of the details -  though I must have quite enjoyed it or I wouldn’t have bothered finishing it. Life’s too short to bother with books you’re not getting anything out of. And what’s more I can’t even find the book to refresh my memory. It’s not where it should be on my shelves (foreign fiction: German). And it’s not even where it shouldn’t be. I’ve scoured every other shelf. I don’t remember lending it to anyone. It’s as if the book has taken itself off in a huff because I didn’t remember it. Though in reality it’s probably just dropped behind the piano or down the back of my unshiftably heavy desk ... Eventually I think to try under the sofa: success. Several books later, I re-read it quickly, and enjoy it hugely. Maybe I just hadn't been in the mood for its 'Germanic humour', as one reviewer put it. Right and wrong times for some books.

Hunger, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly, I found powerful but somehow irritating. It did give an impressive insight into what it’s like to have nothing, to be hungry almost to the point of death, to never know where the next penny’s coming from, and to have the constant problem of shelter and how to keep warm. It increases one’s awareness (or strongly reminds one) of the problems of the deepest underclass in our society. It also shows the desperate protagonist is still able to retain dignity and the ability to carry out kind acts towards others: he is not totally dehumanized by the extremity of his need, and that is his saving grace (because sometimes you feel like shaking him). In fact I was glad to finish it and get onto J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, which I liked a lot less than his other books. I don’t want to say much about it because it might turn into a disproportionate put down of a writer I hugely admire. Was I simply having trouble with fiction? Was it my state of mind? Or was it the books themselves? Three in a row that haven't really 'fed' me in the way I need at the moment.

I had a Doctorow novel - The March - from some time back that I hadn’t read and decided to try that: a suitably gruesome and distressing (but very compulsive) story of the American Civil War about which I was really quite ignorant, apart from what I’d picked up years ago from Little Women, from the biography of its author, Louisa May Alcott, and from a brief visit to Gettysburg. But it still didn’t give me the kind of satisfaction I’d got from my recent non-fiction reads. Maybe it was a phase. Maybe it was just getting older, or getting more easily irritated by certain fictional tricks that one becomes wise to over the years. Or maybe the fiction itself just wasn’t … well, that brilliant, or not the kind I need just at the moment. Maybe certain books are right for certain times in one’s life and others just aren’t.

I pick up another book that's been on my shelf for ages and which I’d started but hadn’t then got too far with (we're waiting for the next Amazon delivery - slower than usual with the approach of Christmas): The World of the Paris Café: Sociability among the French working class, 1789-1914, by W. Scott Haine. Brilliant. Riveting. Full of fascinating detail and, if you’re a lover of Paris cafés, will add a whole new level to your appreciation of them and what they’d stood for, socially and politically, over time. (My daughter gave a copy to a French friend who loved it too, so it’s obviously not just for mad English Francophiles).  

Next, a biography. Again a book ‘waiting to be read’ for a long time (that Amazon order still hasn’t come …). Flaubert: A Life, by Geoffrey Wall. I’d read quite a lot about Flaubert when teaching Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, but nothing as sustained and thorough as this book. There was a book mark a few pages in, so one of us must have started it before. Was it a bad sign, this evidence of rapid abandonment? Was it too badly written to cope with? But there are all sorts of reasons for such abandonments - often the acquisition of something more urgent (or just plain enjoyable) to read. Which must have been the case with this book, which was involving right from the start. It was good to revisit Flaubert … and to reminisce about the visit we’d made to the Rouen hospital where Flaubert’s father had been an eminent physician and where little Gustave was brought up. When we visited, part of it had been turned into a rather half-hearted kind of Flaubert museum: you had to ring the bell for entry. We were the only visitors that day and the suitably white-coated gardien (was he trying to make himself look like a doctor?) gave us a conducted tour and proudly pointed out the stuffed parrot that featured in Barnes’ novel (though whether it was the ‘right’ parrot we’ll never know: see Barnes’ novel for the full import of that statement). We enjoyed the pride and modest swagger of thegardien as he told us, ‘Oui,’ he had come to know ‘Monsieur Barnes’ very well.  

Why is it that we love to meet writers ‘in the flesh’ and not just in print? Why do we flock to book festivals? Or get a thrill out of ‘spotting’ famous writers in unlikely places? I’m as much of a sucker for such things as anyone else. I once actually found myself sitting opposite Julian Barnes in an underground train. Northern Line. Goodge Street. I spent the whole journey studiously not looking at him, though I suspect he’d somehow sensed I’d recognised him and spent the whole journey with his head craned at ninety degrees, looking out of the window … though as the whole journey was in a tunnel, all he could have been looking at was a point-blank reflection of himself. I once bumped into Doris Lessing in the ‘Ladies’ at the National Theatre. I must have given her a look of happy recognition because she gave back to me the most luminous smile I have ever received: unforgettable. And I sat just in front of Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser at some event held in London University. I can’t remember the event, but I remember their presence and the lovely way they spoke to each other. Are we interested to compare their writing selves with their ‘real world’ selves? Or is it just some crass ‘celebrity’ thing? Or is it because we’ve been told that writers put the best of themselves into their writing and we want to make sure there’s not too big a gap between the two? Is it a fear of being ‘taken in’? Of some kind of ‘hypocrisy’? And can we really know our deeper purposes, anyway?

 

Where was I?  Oh, yes: the Flaubert Museum in Rouen …

Do such literary pilgrimages help one understand a writer’s work better? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Our visit to Strindberg’s claustrophobic house in Stockholm might not have elucidated his plays in any direct way, but there was certainly something about its atmosphere that seemed to underscore certain aspects of their emotional colour, I think. Or were we reading the plays into the house? Certainly, when I read the Graham Robb’s biography I was glad to have visited both Balzac's house near Tours and the one in Paris, simply because I could visualize them when they were mentioned. And I agree with Harold Bloom that a good biography of a novelist can be a useful aid to reading their work, provided we ‘avoid the error that good biographers avoid, which is to read the life too closely into the work.’ It is ‘the work in the writer’ that is more important, such as ‘the effect of Proust’s ambitious project upon the author’s own life’, as Harold Bloom puts it, in How to Read and Why.

 

At last! The Amazon order!

            More biographies. The End of Youth: the life and work of Alain-Fournier, by Robert Gibson; Leonard Woolf: A Life, by Victoria Glendinning;The Owl of Minerva: a memoir, by Mary Midgely; and Passionate Minds: the great scientific affair - between Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet - by David Bodanis, plus three non-biographies on some of my favourite subjects, Modernism: the lure of heresy, by Peter Gay, Musicophilia: stories of music and the brain, by Oliver Sacks, and How to Read Montaigne, by Terence Cave.

 

I’m not sure how I feel about the Alain-Fournier biography, though it’s well-written and interesting. The one book he’s known for (he died a premature death in the First World War), Le Grand Meaulnes, is strange, elusive, much loved and much taught to young people. It hovers between the real and the unreal, enchanting the reader equally with sharply-observed naturalistic detail and passages of dream-like phantasmagoria. Robert Gibson meticulously traces the book's possible origins in the places, personalities, and relationships of Alain-Fournier’s actual life. It’s a wonderful piece of research as well as an act of considerable imaginative identification with a writer’s mind, but by pulling the novel so completely down to earth, as it were, rather destroys some element of its magic. I’ll never be able to read it in quite the same way again. Something of the mystery has gone.

            And I suppose this is one of the risks when you open a book - open yourself to what a book has to tell you: it may have a negative effect. I found myself becoming very irritated by Alain-Fournier himself, too. Sometimes I wanted to shake him! But one mustn’t let the personality of the author determine one’s response to their work - which is usually a distillation of the best of themselves. (It probably wouldn’t have been a bundle of fun to live with Flaubert … or Tolstoy …). Even the best novels aren’t written by saints but by erring humans with, we hope, compassionate and attentive minds.

 

It doesn't stop the bodily panic but ... An Everywhere: a little book about reading

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, £8.99, Oxygen Books

 

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

                           So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

The end of Shakespeare’s (probably most famous) sonnet, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’. An assertion of the ‘immortality’ conferred by writing - both for the subject and the writer. A common enough idea: writing to leave some trace of the self in the world after leaving it. Or some trace of the persons (even an unknown, starving Indian), places, events or ideas written about. Probably not very dignified to admit it, these days, that one writes partly to avoid total 'disappearance' from the world after death: a bit ‘naff’, a bit old-fashioned. Living, as we do now, with the constant background knowledge of the vast stretches of time and unimaginable hugeness of the universe, any brief after-life from fame as a writer seems more than laughable.

     Then you could say that goes for human life altogether - and yet we cling to it! I'm trying to read some more scientific things to help me keep a purchase on 'proportion', trying to calm my panicking body into accepting its minuteness and lack of significance. I pull off the shelf a little book about the stars - amazing pictures and full of overwhelming facts (which I can only assume are correct): for example, if you were able to drive a car through space at 100 km per hour, it would take you 170 years to reach the sun, and 46,000,000 years to reach the nearest star in our galaxy. After a few pages, I can't take any more and end up just looking at the pictures. Then I turn to something more substantial. In LIFE: an unauthorised biography, Richard Fortey points out that the 'narrative of life' has lasted more than 3,000,000,000 (that's three thousand million) years and that trying to express such ungraspable vastnesses of time in homely metaphors - such as a clock-face, mankind emerging at just one minute to midnight - only serves to trivialise a magnitude which should be held in awe. (Does that mean he would have disapproved of the 'homely' car driving through space example? I actually thought it was quite good at conveying 'awe'. )

     The book was fascinating, but it still didn't stop my bodily panic. I know my brief presence on a rather small planet in a modest-sized galaxy in an ungraspably vast universe is much less than half a twitch of a flea's little toe, and yet ... And yet we're desperate to hang on to our flickering little spark of life, even after we've done our duty to the species, reproduced to make sure our genes go on.

     We have to decide whether we’re going to consider human life as being ‘worth’ nothing … or everything. Or everything within that nothingness. Everything because of that nothingness. Worth more because of the vastness and nothingness that surrounds us. Hanging onto the wonder of it as well as the horror. Considering the harsh conditions in which so many human beings are forced to live, relatively few choose the escape-route of suicide. Not that many people actually want to die. I turn back to 'literature' and, as usual, Shakespeare hits the nail on its flat, round, workaday head in Measure for Measure:

                         The weariest and most loathèd worldly life

                         That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

                         Can lay on nature is a paradise

                         To what we fear of death.

 

Though, being Shakespeare, he also expresses the opposite view in the same play.

                         The best of rest is sleep,

                         And that thou oft provok’st: yet grossly fear’st

                         Thy death, which is no more.

 

I think back to the first night of my first stay in hospital. Some time after the lights had been dimmed for the night (it’s never ever dark in hospital), a wailing voice started up from the adjacent ward. I think it was female.

      ‘I don’t want to die … Oh, please don’t let me die … Please don’t let me die … I don’t want to die … I don’t want to die …’

     First reaction: annoyance. Impossible to sleep. The voice was disturbing everyone. Even poor little Elsie was shifting in her bed. And it’s undignified, such yelling. You have to be brave in hospital: it’s what everyone expects. Stiff upper lip and all that …

    Then I began to warm to the honesty of it. Wasn’t that what we were all doing, inside, yelling ‘I don’t want to die’? Otherwise, what were we doing in hospital, trying to be cured? Like pop-singers singing our love for us, or footballers playing out our tribal urges, or writers putting down on paper our own observations of life (‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d’, as Alexander Pope neatly put it), this honest voice was yelling into the night for all of us. The voice behind the urge to create something to remain in the world, something more permanent than flesh.

     One reason why people write. In Nothing to be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes imagines a psychotherapist telling him that his fear of death is bound up with his literary activities; that he makes up stories so that his name and some part of his unique personhood will remain in the world after his physical disappearance, and that this provides him with some comfort.

      And people aren't content to just ‘write’; they want to be published, want to be read. The god-like power of the reader: to deliver that longed-for immortality to the writer. By being influenced by what we read, by having our minds and actions in some way modified by the writer’s vision allows the writer to go on acting in the world - acting on the world - though dead. Harold Bloom puts it rather nicely in The Western Canon: a poem, novel, or play, he says, takes on all the disorders of humanity, including our fear of our own mortality, 'which in the art of literature is transmuted into the quest to be canonical, to join communal or societal memory.’

 

                     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

                    So long lives this …

 

 

I need a bit of light relief. Stalin’s Russia is still hanging over me, and thinking so much about my lost father and the vastness of the universe ... none of it is helping the depressive effects of some of the chemo. Time to reach for that Christmas present: Jeremy Mercer’s Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs: The Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co.

     Mercer, a Canadian journalist, escapes to Paris to avoid a possible revenge attack threatened by a criminal. Penniless, he ends up staying (like so many other penniless writers through the decades) at the famous left-bank bookshop run by the eccentric and humane George Whitman, called ‘Shakespeare and Co.’, after Sylvia Beach’s original establishment that played host to (and sometimes published) such writers as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.

     ‘George’s’ shop is extraordinary, terrifying (how it’s only caught fire once, I’ll never know), magical, inspiring, irritating, smelly, and utterly irresistible. Malcolm and I have often visited the shop - more as a ritual homage to a phenomenon we approve of than to actually buy books there. We love the idea of the absolute, almost crazy commitment of George Whitman to his vision, his ideals. A breath from another world, one in the eye for the increasingly corporate rat-race that characterizes the modern book 'industry'. And there’s something about the crooked floors, over-loaded labyrinth of bookshelves, creaky, narrow stairs and the idealism that reminds us of being young, being students, being full of literary hope and political ardour, of having a life-time of reading and writing ahead.

     Mercer gives an insider’s account of the life of ‘Shakespeare and Co’, most of it not usually seen by the casual visitor or customer. The people who live there, free, in various little fetid beds in odd corners of the establishment. The wonderfully humane and generous spirit of its owner - even if his culinary skills include sweeping the husks of kitchen cockroaches into the dish ‘for extra protein’. The condition of the one shared loo sends some inmates to the nearest café. But above all one loves George’s unshakeable belief in the humanizing power of books: he presses the best of them upon his guests, who are supposed to commit to reading one book a day in return for free board and lodging. A pleasant romp of a book blending familiarity with some new, behind-the-scenes insights.

     (Like all 'living legends', the amazing George Whitman finally had to become just a legend: he died in 2011, aged ninety-eight. But his daughter, Sylvia Whitman, has taken over the shop - which is still thriving.)

 

I want to stay light and I want to be intelligently charmed, so next I plump for a Daniel Pennac, in translation this time: The Dictator and the Hammock - translated by Patricia Clancy. Even if I hadn’t already known his work, the review extract on the back cover would have sold it to me at once: ‘His masters are Denis Diderot and Laurence Sterne’. (Diderot alone would have done it.)

      How to sum up this playful, quirky, entertaining, and ultimately moving book? - a book about dictators and doubles and look-alikes, about peasant suffering in South America (with a glance at ‘magic realism’), about cinema, about Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin and Hitler, about human hopes and dreams and America as the land of dreams but also of greed, destructiveness, inhumanity. About the writing of stories and how authors create characters and situations out of the stuff of their own life: ‘From the unpredictable and essential combination of thematic demands, narrative requirements, deposits left by life experiences, the vagaries of daydreams, the arcane mysteries of fickle memory, events, books, images, people …’

     And you’re never sure what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘unreal’: a character we’re convinced is a real acquaintance of the writer is suddenly revealed to be yet another fictional construct as the story moves between high fantasy to the viscerally real description of a sleeping tramp in a Paris Métro station. Everyone is avoiding him, looking away, not because of the smell but because his flies are open and his penis hanging out. The female friend with the author at the time, we’re told, ‘stops when she reaches him, leans over, puts his penis back into his trousers, also tucks in the ends of his shirt, zips up his fly and buckles his belt …’ A gesture of moving humanity that inspires the creation of a character in the story who performs a comparable (though different) act of deep kindness and delicacy.

     The book also made me want to watch the whole of Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator: I’ve only ever seen brief clips. It’s good when a book leads us to something else.

 An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, paperback original £8.99, is published by Oxygen Books.

The fears and the passion that made me write An Everywhere: a little book about reading

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, published by Oxygen Books

I had a hard time during my first period of chemotherapy and couldn't do much more than sit on the sofa and read. I've always loved books but for years too much of my reading had been connected with teaching, research and editing. Suddenly I could read whatever took my fancy - and I started making notes about what I'd read.

As a kind of therapy, I also started to write down, in a very honest way, my reactions to the cancer diagnosis and my feelings during treatment. One tries to put on a brave face for family and friends so as not to add to their anguish of knowing you are so ill, but it can be a relief to give expression to what one is really 'going through' psychologically.

Writing about reading made me reflect on why it had come to be so important to me. In analysing the reasons I found they grew out of - or were attached to - various personal experiences, and I found myself hanging the things I wanted to say onto incidents from my life as a kind of proof of the validity of the 'abstract' ideas.

Pretty soon I found that my notes were turning into the outline for a book. Curious about what I was scribbling while sitting on the sofa, my husband finally read it and pointed out that it might be useful to others to read: after all, an awful lot of people face the diagnosis of cancer and have to cope with the exigencies of treatment. He passed it on to a few friends and family members and their responses were genuinely enthusiastic.

After the treatment, with the original emotions 'recollected in tranquillity' but not diluted, I worked on a couple more drafts of the book. And that's the story behind An Everywhere: a little book about reading.

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, Paperback Original, £8.99/ $11.12, e-book.  Available from all good bookshops and Amazon.

 

Being ill, a dead man in Calcutta and reading Tolstoy: An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes, £8.99 paperback, £1.85 e-book,  Oxygen Books, Published 10 April 2014

'A brilliant guide to the city of books ... I love Heather's passion for reading and the blend of erudition and intimacy.' Helen Dunmore

Heather Reyes

An Everywhere: a little book about reading

ISBN: 9780992636401  Paperback Original  £8.99 Published 10 April 2014

During several months of treatment for a serious illness, writer and publisher Heather Reyes decides to turn a necessary evil into an opportunity: the luxury of reading whatever takes her fancy.

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is a quietly passionate and witty defence of the joys and consolations of reading in both the difficult and day-to-day aspects of our lives.

Here is a brilliantly original and inspiring book about reading that shows how our everyday simple acts of reading and writing can, literally, make of our lives an Everywhere.

Heather Reyes is the editor of Oxygen Books' acclaimed city-pick series of urban travel guides and the author of Zade, longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize with Zadie Smith and Joanna Briscoe. Her new novel, Miranda Road, is published in May 2014. An Everywhere is a Bookseller Buyers' Guide Spring 2014 Highlight of the Season.

'It is such a truthful book, honest about panic and anguish, and fascinating about what happens when the panic ebbs and the reader continues' Helen Dunmore

'This is a gem of a book, one to read and re-read and to carry around like a bible - not just a guide to great literature but as a reminder that reading is the highest form of religion ... An Everywhere is part good-read guide, part travel guide, part memoir. Reyes writes with the imagination and skill of the writer, the heart of a reader, the forbearance and wisdom of the patient and the expertise of the well-travelled.' Cheryl Moskowitz

'While receiving cancer treatment, Reyes - novelist and editor of Oxygen Books' excellent City-Pick series - turned the enforced layoff into an opportunity and read widely and capriciously. The result is this engaging and heartfelt meditation on the joy and consolations of reading in our daily lives. Helen Dunmore has appropriately dubbed it "a brilliant travel guide to the city of books", and I lapped it up. Reyes' new novel, Miranda Road is published next month.' Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller, Editor's Non-Fiction Pick for April.

A period of serious illness brought writer and publisher Heather Reyes back to reading. She hadn’t found time to read seriously for years but now she returned to it with renewed enthusiasm. Her new situation gave her the time and space for reading. Instead of feeling trapped by her illness, she began to experience a new sense of freedom. She began to relish the opportunity to read whatever she wanted. Her passion for books was unquenchable and in An Everywhere: A Little Book About Reading she documents her experiences.

Reframing her illness as an opportunity, Reyes begins to read as a form of escape and because, as a book-lover, it was her natural impulse. In this resulting book, she explores the value of books in our everyday lives as well as in times of crisis. She views this as a form of ‘bibliotherapy’; immersing oneself in literature as an important part of the healing process. As Reyes rediscovers the pleasure of reading and thinking about books, she considers their importance for everyone. Through references to a wide range of literature, she explores how we experience books and our internal dialogues with their writers.

Reyes is also the editor of a series of urban travel anthologies. In this book, she views reading as a form of travel and approaches it with the same enthusiasm as exploring an unfamiliar city. She blends travel writing and memoir with a celebration of books. Reading it evokes the feeling of browsing the shelves of a bookshop in a new city.

This is a delicate, passionate book. It is a memoir of a bibliophile and a celebration of books. Written in the context of serious illness, it explores the intrinsic value of reading for everyone. It offers a rare opportunity to delve into the mind of a passionate reader and it will renew your love of reading.

Amy Spencer, NAWE, National Association for Writers in Education.

 

For more information about the author and book please contact Malcolm Burgess, tel: 01277 263770, 07594490216 malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com   www.oxygenbooks.co.uk

#FREEKINDLEBOOK: 'Brilliant' Helen Dunmore,Heather Reyes, An Everywhere: a little book about reading

An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes 'Brilliant' Helen Dunmore

Read the FREE Kindle Book here this week (offers closes 14 March):

http://www.amazon.com/Everywhere-Little-Book-About-Reading-ebook/dp/B00IS770B4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1394617337&sr=1-1&keywords=an+everywhere+a+little+book+about+reading

 

Turning cancer treatment into an opportunity: An Everywhere: a little book about reading, Heather Reyes

 

'A brilliant guide to the city of books ... I love Heather's passion for reading and the blend of erudition and intimacy.' Helen Dunmore

Heather Reyes

An Everywhere: a little book about reading

ISBN: 9780992636401  e-book out now £1.85/ $3.05 Paperback Original  £8.99/ $11.02 Published 10 April 2014

During several months of cancer treatment, writer and publisher Heather Reyes decides to turn a necessary evil into an opportunity: the luxury of reading whatever takes her fancy.

An Everywhere: a little book about reading is a quietly passionate and witty defence of the joys and consolations of reading in both the difficult and day-to-day aspects of our lives.

Here is a brilliantly original and inspiring book about reading that shows how our everyday simple acts of reading and writing can, literally, make of our lives an Everywhere.

Heather Reyes is the editor of Oxygen Books' acclaimed city-pick series of urban travel guides and the author of Zade, longlisted for the Prince Maurice Prize with Zadie Smith and Joanna Briscoe. Her new novel, Miranda Road, is published in May 2014. An Everywhere is a Bookseller Buyers' Guide Spring 2014 Highlight of the Season.

'It is such a truthful book, honest about panic and anguish, and fascinating about what happens when the panic ebbs and the reader continues' Helen Dunmore

'This is a gem of a book, one to read and re-read and to carry around like a bible - not just a guide to great literature but as a reminder that reading is the highest form of religion ... An Everywhere is part good-read guide, part travel guide, part memoir. Reyes writes with the imagination and skill of the writer, the heart of a reader, the forbearance and wisdom of the patient and the expertise of the well-travelled.' Cheryl Moskowitz

'An engaging and heartfelt meditation on the joys and occasional consolations of reading in our lives. I lapped it up' Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

'It will renew your love of reading - a delicate, passionate book' Amy Spencer

Click here for UK e-book

Click here for US e-book