Covering the topic

I've been rereading Francis Spufford's excellent, illuminating The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading. It's one of those rare books that keeps making me want to yell, "Testify! Sing it! Yes, brother, yes, you are so right!"

On learning to read: "By the time I reached The Hobbit's last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts."

On reading horror and having it get under your skin (or not): "You lay down the Stephen King, give a comfortable shrug, and never think about it again unless you want to, you lucky bastard."

On the nature of addiction: "I don't quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks facedown near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don't go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time. When I'm tired and therefor indecisive, last thing at night, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am doing to have with me while I brush my teeth." By this point I'm hooting with laughter, the pleasure of recognition joined to the knowledge that this is a ridiculous way to live.

I need to hunt up Spufford's book on exploring the Antarctic, but niggling suspicion says that it won't elicit the same desire to shriek amen.