A Life with Books

Julian Barnes, one of Britain's most distinguished novelists, is also an acclaimed essayist. A Life with Books is an essay specially commissioned for Independent Booksellers Week, supplied exclusively to independent bookshops. In it, Julian Barnes writes about his early awareness of books and about his obsessive book-collecting and time spent in second-hand bookshops around the country. He ends by praising the physical book and expressing the confident hope that it will survive.

Read more

A Life with Books is published as a pamphlet, with cover art by Suzanne Dean, the renowned designer responsible for the cover of Julian Barnes' Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 27 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked A Life with Books? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked A Life with Books. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love Shares books about, essays, nonfiction
  2. A Reader on Reading Shares books about, nonfiction, essays
  3. Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting and Living with Books Shares books about, nonfiction, essays
  4. Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books Shares books about, nonfiction, essays

“People who read A Life with Books tend to reach for these next.”

  1. By the Book: A Reader's Guide to Life
  2. The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction
  3. Books That Changed The World
  4. New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families

“If you want more of the same (literary criticism), start with these.”

  1. A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews
  2. Reading in Bed: Personal Essays on the Glories of Reading
  3. Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the World
  4. Pity the Animal

“If it was the books about that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
  2. Browse: The World in Bookshops
  3. More Baths, Less Talking
  4. Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted
  2. The Bookshop Strikes Back
  3. Books v. Cigarettes
  4. Bibliomysteries: Stories of Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores