I occasionally venture beyond my fiction readings into the realm of non-fiction, and I’m pretty sure it counts even if the book is itself about reading. I saw The Child That Books Built mentioned in a post on Neil Gaiman’s blog and it sounded interesting enough, so I bought it the next time I was in a bookstore.
I found the book to be a rather mixed bag. There were parts that I, like Gaiman, found eerily similar to my own experiences—the way reading can blot out all that transpires in the surrounding world, the discovery of SF, reading The Hobbit, reading the Narnia books. (Though in my case, the Narnia series were the first “real” books I read with The Hobbit following shortly thereafter.) There were other parts that didn’t necessarily resonate with my experiences but which I nevertheless found interesting—the discussion of lingual development in children, for instance. Some things were just there as autobiographical but didn’t have echoes in my life—much of Spufford’s childhood reading differed from mine, being separated by both distance and time, while there were books that interested him but not me, such as the Little House on the Prairie series. Possibly related to those were the parts where I felt that the book rambled without any clear purpose or result—the discussion of the primeval forest, or the exploration of small-town America.
Overall, I found it interesting but not really compelling. Yet another book tucked into the category of, “Huh? Oh, yeah, I’ve read that.”