An unabashed bookworm, I make my way through an inordinate amount of books every year. But a recent perusal of my shelves led me to realise that I don’t just enjoy reading books, but that I rather enjoy reading about books. Below is a brief list of books about books, including two of my all-time favourites, The House on Moon Lake and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

Feel free to add any bookish suggestions that come to mind!

The House on Moon Lake by Francesca Duranti

Blurb: Fabrizio Garrone is an impoverished but aristocratic translator who has been living a life of quiet desperation in Milan. He feels underappreciated and tormented by a persistent sense of having been cheated by life. But when he reads about a lost Viennese novel – The House on Moon Lake – in the journals of a late esteemed literary critic, he dreams that this project will put him on the cultural and literary map, and finally bring him the accolades that have eluded him.

Fabrizio journeys to Vienna, tracks down the book, and translates it, and in so doing embarks on a nightmarish search for the truth behind the events depicted in it, as well as for clues about the tragic life of its forgotten author. When asked to write a short biography of the novelist, Fabrizio must invent details missing from the last three years of his subject’s life. The resulting biography is a publishing phenomenon. But the repercussions for Fabrizio are profound: he becomes the willing victim of a person he had thought to be fictional.

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If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Blurb: Calvino’s masterpiece opens with a scene that’s reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it’s taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch-back ride to the heart of storytelling.

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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (our review forthcoming)

Blurb: Barcelona, 1945—Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.

Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last of Carax’s books in existence.

Before Daniel knows it, his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness, and doomed love, and before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

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The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak (our review forthcoming)

Blurb: HERE IS A SMALL FACT – YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION – THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH. It’s a small story, about: a girl, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. ANOTHER THING YOU SHOULD KNOW – DEATH WILL VISIT THE BOOK THIEF THREE TIMES

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 How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely (see our review)

Blurb: What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough: a realistic amount of fame that will open new avenues of sexual opportunity; the kind of financial comfort that will allow him to spend his life pursuing hobbies such as boating or skeet shooting at his stately home by the ocean or a scenic lake; and perhaps mostly importantly the chance to humiliate his ex-girlfriend at her wedding. This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end. Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became A Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston, to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan’s publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip. The horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete’s “pile of garbage” called The Tornado Ashes Club became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America will change everything you think you know about literature, appearance, truth, beauty, and those people out there, somewhere in America, who still care about books.

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Salamander by Thomas Wharton

Blurb: The English are about to seize Canada from the French; in the midst of Wolfe’s siege of Quebec, a colonel walks into a bookshop. It is run by an enigmatic, combative, proud young woman, who proceeds to tell him all about the ideal book, the castle where it was made, and the man who made it.

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Wit’s End: A Novel by Karen Joy Fowler

Blurb: Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, Wit’s End opens as Rima Lanisell arrives at her godmother’s old Victorian mansion, weary from her recent losses — an inventive if at times irritating father, a beloved brother. (Indeed, Rima seems to lose people and things habitually — sunglasses and keys, lovers and family members.) At loose ends, she has come to coastal California to regroup and to meet that legendary godmother. She soon finds herself enmeshed in a household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, and of course, godmother Addison Early, a secretive and feisty bestselling mystery writer who once knew Rima’s father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what their relationship was all about.

That won’t be easy. Over the years, Addison has fought fiercely to protect her work and her privacy, even as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, and websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over her plotlines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many of those fans, Maxwell Lane is more real than Addison herself. Wit’s End is also a highly original take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world over — except by authors. Word has it that Addison is so beleaguered, so distracted by her fans’ Web postings that she has writers block.

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Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Blurb: Meggie loves books. So does her father, Mo, a bookbinder, although he has never read aloud to her since her mother mysteriously disappeared. They live quietly until the night a stranger knocks at their door. He has come with a warning that forces Mo to reveal an extraordinary secret – a storytelling secret that will change their lives for ever.

See also:

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The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom (see our review)

Blurb: Introducing Israel Armstrong, one of literature’s most unlikely detectives in the first of a series of novels from the author of the critically acclaimed Ring Road. Israel is an intelligent, shy, passionate, sensitive sort of soul: he’s Jewish; he’s a vegetarian; he could maybe do with losing a little weight. And he’s just arrived in Ireland to take up his first post as a librarian. But the library’s been shut down and Israel ends up stranded on the North Antrim coast driving an old mobile library. There’s nice scenery, but 15,000 fewer books than there should be. Who on earth steals that many books? How? When would they have time to read them all? And is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where he can get a proper cappuccino and a decent newspaper? Israel wants answers!

See also:

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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

Blurb: Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest–to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.

As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past then she could have ever imagined.

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The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

Blurb: High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own — populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.

Taking readers on a vivid journey through the loss of innocence into adulthood and beyond, New York Times bestselling author John Connolly tells a dark and compelling tale that reminds us of the enduring power of stories in our lives.

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The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Blurb: In Jasper Fforde’s Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde’s ingenious fantasy—enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel—unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix

See also:

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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (see our review)

Blurb: Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do….

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Booked to Die by John Dunning

Blurb: In the first Cliff Janeway mystery, the Denver homicide detective loses his job after taking the law into his own hands by brutally assaulting a man suspected of killing a rare book collector, and continues to investigate the case by becoming a collector himself.

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Ex Libris by Ross King (see our review)

Blurb: Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries.

As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold’s hunt for one of these stolen volumes — a lost Hermetic text — soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue. His fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

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The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

Blurb: Bastian embarks on a wild adventure when he enters the magical world of Fantastica, a doomed land filled with dragons, giants, and monsters, and risks his life to save Fantastica by going on a very dangerous quest.

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Codex by Lev Grossman (see our review)

Blurb: When hotshot young investment banker Edward Wozny is called to the home of an important and mysterious client, the last thing he expects is to be ordered to uncrate and organize a library of rare books. Edward’s indignation turns to curiosity when he learns that among the volumes there may be hidden a unique medieval codex, a priceless treasure kept sealed away for many years and for many reasons. Enlisting the help of Margaret Napier, a passionate and brilliant medieval scholar, Edward learns the strange history of the codex’s author, Gervase of Langford, as well as the dark, intricate tale that lies within the missing medieval text. As Edward’s obsession with the codex deepens, friends introduce him to MOMUS, an addictive computer game set in a fantasy world that, perplexingly, begins to parallel the legend of the codex. Yet MOMUS confounds more than it clarifies, and it becomes evident that someone is trying to prevent Edward and Margaret from ever finding the elusive codex. As they race against an unknown enemy, the two begin to uncover secrets that the codex’s powerful owner will do anything to keep hidden.

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The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Blurb: The eponymous reader of Alan Bennett’s good-natured novella is none other than England’s own Queen Elizabeth, who pursues her incorrigible corgis into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, discovers the world of serious literature, and forsakes her duties for the pleasures of obsessive reading. Guided by a former kitchen employee, Her Majesty dives headlong into the works of Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Nancy Mitford, and other literary icons — while distressed advisers, fearing a constitutional crisis, scheme to divert her from her newfound passion. A renowned essayist (Untold Stories) and playwright (The History Boys), Bennett demonstrates once again his unerring eye for the eccentricities of the British national character. We suspect this droll, slyly subversive little story is destined to make a big splash on both sides of the pond.

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Dominance by Will Lavender

Blurb: When the students in Winchester University’s Logic and Reasoning 204 arrive for their first day of class, they are greeted not with a syllabus or texts, but with a startling assignment from Professor Williams: Find a hypothetical missing girl named Polly. If after being given a series of clues and details the class has not found her before the end of the term in six weeks, she will be murdered. At first the students are as intrigued by the premise of their puzzle as they are wary of the strange and slightly creepy Professor Williams. But as they delve deeper into the mystery, they begin to wonder: Is the Polly story simply a logic exercise, designed to teach them rational thinking skills, or could it be something more sinister and dangerous? The mystery soon takes over the lives of three students as they find disturbing connections between Polly and themselves. Characters that were supposedly fictitious begin to emerge in reality. Soon, the boundary between the classroom assignment and the real world becomes blurred—and the students wonder if it is their own lives they are being asked to save.

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