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The books that made me

Lively, Penelope
http://unherd.com/2023/02/the-books-that-made-me-2/

Publisher:  UnHerd
Date Written:  01/02/2023
Year Published:  2023  
Resource Type:  Article

Lively explores the role of reading in her writing process. She explains that every library is autobiographical, with its potential to shape and define its readers.

Abstract: 
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Extract:

Here is the answer to the child's question. Ideas come from books, not in any sense of derivation, but entirely in the sense of fertilisation. Something is read that slots in with long-term preoccupations and sets a story going. The account of that gentleman pottering around Stonehenge with his charts and his measuring ropes; the concept of those strange fossils preserved in the Burgess Shale deposits, one of which is ancestral to ourselves.

About 3,000 books line the walls of my house. Most of them I shall never read again, but they must stay there. They define me; they remind me that I thought this, was interested in that; they reassure me, as I hurtle towards 90. Occasionally I shed a few books, but to get rid of many of them would be like discarding part of my mind.

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