Kathleen Jones: Reading My Mother's Reading Diary
I sporadically keep a log of what I read. I always start off with good intentions, write them all down for a few weeks and then get caught up in other things, leaving the pages blank. Only a few out of the thousands of books I’ve read since I left school have been recorded. But, when my mother died a few years ago I discovered among her things a series of little notebooks that were a record of her reading from 1948 until the week before she died, with very few gaps. She was a voracious reader and had a book in her hand when she slipped into her last coma. In her notebooks she wrote the month, title and author and gave each book a star rating that reflected how much she had enjoyed it. I’ve found it fascinating to go back and discover who were the most fashionable authors of each decade. She also read the classics widely - particularly Dickens and Doestoevsky, but not much Hardy or Jane Austen. Trollope and Walpole were among her favourite...