There can never be too many books

And so it is that World Book Day is upon us again – and almost gone, at the time of writing.

In an era where, increasingly, digital seems to dominate, it’s wonderful to think about books.

Yes, yes: I know that books can be digital too, but, to me – and many millions more – there is nothing to beat the tactile joy of a real book. Indeed, for billions of people on this planet, the old-fashioned variety of bound paper is all that they can hope to have access to.

Do you remember the joy when, as a child, you managed to read a book on your own for the first time?

I cannot remember the title of the first book I managed like that, but I remember sitting in a small red and white straw child’s basket chair with it, and being so proud when I got to the last page.

Not that long after, I took enormous pleasure in Enid Blyton’s Well Really, Mr Twiddle, which had me hooting with hysterical laughter.

Many years later, I got pretty much the same sense of pride from reading an entire Asterix book in German. Books always offer potential for new moments of personal achievement.

At the beginning of my twenties, I suffered some sort of breakdown after being injured and then chucked out of polytechnic. For ages, I couldn’t read – even much-loved books could not hold my concentration beyond the first few pages.

What revived reading for me was Stephen King. I picked up Carrie in a local bookshop and couldn’t it down. Then The Stand and It, with many more to follow.

I ‘discovered’ Terry Pratchett before he was anywhere near national treasure status, standing in a small sci-fi and fantasy bookshop to meet him once when nobody else was even around.

The result is three very precious signed volumes of the earliest Discworld novels.

Books – among the very first things I’d unpack in my nomadic early adulthood: get those out and it would start to feel like home.

Books, which provide a wonderful pre-holiday ritual when considering what from my buckling shelves I wish to take.

Books, which bring with them knowledge and entertainment.

While the majority of the books that I have bought in recent years have been non-fiction, I still seek out good storytelling too.

Penguin are now releasing the entire Maigret collection, and with new translations that finally do Simenon’s noir novels justice. Those are on pre-order with me.

There are old friends that I have read many times already and will probably read many times more: Jan Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre (which I hated at school), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Stephen King’s The Shining (the movie was crap) and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, all of which I find new things in every time I pick them up.

I have a few antiquarian (relish that word) books – some up to 200 years old. They are to be treasured and looked after: I feel only a temporary guardian.

And I also rather pride myself on having a collection of books about German history – no! Not that period! – that would, I suspect, count as pretty decent.

I still judge a bookshop on its history section: on whether it is just full of WWII and the Nazis or goes beyond that.

Of course, talking of the Nazis, it’s always worth remembering how they burnt books on Bebelplatz in Berlin in 1933 – right next to the Humboldt University. That symbolism should tell you something about the power of the written word. And today, of course, we have groups of religious fundamentalists who want to deny people – and women and girls in particular – the right to learn.

Whether in the deepest, darkest days or winter, curled up on the sofa with a good read and a hot chocolate or under a parasol on the beach in the height of summer, is there really anything that can compare to the pleasure that can be found in the pages of a good book?

So let’s celebrate books today – and those who create them and those who read them – but let’s never stop loving books for all the other days of the year.

And PS: make sure you love your local library too.

How many books can I pack?

Gore Vidal – purveyor of light fiction?

It's the time of the year of The Book. Or rather, The Books. How many? What sort? Light? Heavy? Fiction? Non-fiction?

This year, the great debate about holiday reading matter has only begun earnestly far later than usual.

An initially rather ambitious list had been sketched out in my mind for some time, but the ensuing weeks had seen it redrafting itself in less literary terms.

It was the moment, I'd decided, for Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. The chance to spend pretty much entire days reading is the perfect time to get into such a book.

But with a certain rueful sadness, I've been pushing that idea toward touch. Frankly, I'm just too tired.

I had also been contemplating Lewis Lockwood's Beethoven: The music and the life, but have abandoned that in favour of the first volume of Paul O'Grady's autobiography, At My Mother's Knee ... And Other Low Joints, which has been recommended as a damned good – and very funny – read.

But then something rather unusual happened – unusual, that is, because in general, I'm a rather slow reader and because, right now, I'm spectacularly knackered.

Yet in successive weekends, I've swept through The Lady in the Lake and The High Window, with Simenon's Maigret and the Black Sheep (poorly translated, since you ask) in between, so it struck me that a full-blown Raymond Chandler binge seems to be on the cards.

In which case, my Book Club 1979 omnibus, containing Playback, The Long Goodbye and The Little Sister, looks set to travel. It was one of my first real adult books, and it's got Bogart on the cover.

St one time or another, I've read all the Philip Marlowe novels, but with the exception of The Big Sleep, none of them for a good 20 years or more.

No extra Maigret will travel, because they're so short that I've had to take a shed load to make it worth while.

It did raise the point in my mind, though, of the snobbery that still surrounds genre fiction. Chandler's novels are superbly written – there's a poetic quality to the prose – with both intelligence and an understanding of the universal human condition.

I'd suggest that they have far more to say to us (and are a vastly better read) than much of what I've read in recent years that passes as modern English 'literature' (it's a wonder how Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend, for instance – a book that I was handed to review when a positive review was demanded – has ever received plaudits: it has so much less subtlety than anything Chandler wrote, yet it's 'literature').

Jean Gabin: 'Maigret needs you!'

Simenon may not be in quite the same class – although that may not be helped by translation matters – but the Maigret novels are still stylish and tight, with an underlying empathy for the ordinary man and woman in the street.

Only a short while ago, Iain Banks died. Hailed for his literary works such as The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road, but less so for his sci-fi novels, which were even published under the ever-so-slightly different name of Iain M Banks.

Literature and genre fiction, it seems to say, can never quite meet.

But Banks's Culture novels are not simply great yarns -–and they are most certainly that – but they also have depth, and use the world he created to explore some fascinating ideas.

And Consider Phlebas is, for me, that very rare beast: a sci-fi novel that I've read more than once - a stonkingly good space opera that goes beyond any confinements of (sub) genre and into being a good piece of literature.

Terry Pratchett is another who suffers from this snobbery about the divide between genre fiction and Literature, although the volume and overall consistency of the quality of his satire has, to an extent, forced the naysayers' backs against the wall.

Admittedly, that's partly because satire is a very English form of literature, with a long and glistening tradition - even if some people seem to have forgotten that Pride and Prejudice is essentially a satire and not an 18th-century rom-com.

Tom Sharpe – another who has lately departed this life – was a particularly savage example of the species and, as a satirist, his work was never subject to stuck-up-nose syndrome.

Incidentally, if you haven't read them, Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, his first two novels, which are an assault (and battery) on apartheid in South Africa, are well worth a read. Having visited Pietermaritzburg, where both novels are set, it's almost frightening real. Indeed, I'll swear blind I've actually met one of his characters there.

Personally, I think Pratchett is better: where Sharpe most often seems just to be rage, with Sir Terry, there's a deep underlying humanity, and his characters are far more rounded than Sharpe – or, for that matter, PG Wodehouse.

Finally – the light fiction.

Samuel Vimes, for instance, who appears in a number of the Discworld novels, is a delightful and enormously believable creation.

And Pratchett too is the one author I can think of who has made me howl with laughter on one page and shed a tear just a turn of the page later.

If the difference between literature and popular fiction is that, at core, the former makes you think, then Pratchett does that. As does Iain M Banks.

But back to the books list. After such a sudden spurt of reading, I'm back in the mood for some more serious stuff.

So the pile – and it does exist as a real, actual pile – is now made up of a collection of Mann's short stories, including Mario and the Magician and The Black Swan, plus Gore Vidal's Julian and Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark.

Then there's the O'Grady, plus the second installment of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula alternative history/horror/steampunk/fantasy series, The Bloody Red Baron (I read the first part in Collioure last summer and it was very good).

And some more crime fiction in Involuntary Witness, a police procedural from Italy's Gianrico Carofiglio.

Now remind me: this is the easy reading selection, right?

Getting down in Maigret's Paris

The Friend of Madame Maigret by Georges Simenon

While Maigret is becoming increasingly frustrated at his attempts to prove that a brutal murder has been committed at a local bookbinder prove fruitless Madame Maigret has a strange encounter with a woman and a child while she waits for a dental appointment.

Surely they couldn’t be connected?

I love the Maigret novels. Pithily written with a wonderful central character – Maigret lives in a twilight world, somewhere between the law and crime. He has more empathy with the men (and women) he hunts down than with the stiff suits who fill high offices in the judicial system; he’s happier in the seedier streets of Paris than in any smart and glamorous settings.

And then, of course, there is that second major character in the novels – Paris itself. A city that has been Baron Haussmanned, certainly, but not sanitised out of all recognition. Les Halles, for instance, appears as the ‘stomach of Paris’, before it was turned into a pretty dismal underground shopping centre.

And Maigret guides us through that colourful underbelly, sitting in little cafés, where he knows most of the prostitutes by name, mulling over cases as he stokes his pipe and sips a little cider.

When in that city, I find myself recognising names from Simenon’s books – and looking for areas that are mentioned. When I first tried calvados for the first time, it was in large part because it is featured in the novels.

And this volume, from 1949, is no exception. What it does also do, is give us a few more scenes with Madame Maigret, throwing a few stray hints our way about their relationship and her life.

Otherwise, this is as thickly plotted as ever – and just as much of a delight to read as one expects.

I’m now trawling ebay to build my collection – since most of his novels are shamefully out of print in English.