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“If you can’t go out into the world, bring the world to you” (it’s all about books!)

22nd October 2018

An Everywhere: a little book about reading by Heather Reyes.

The author was diagnosed with cancer and she decided to turn the months of chemotherapy that lay ahead into a positive journey of words. A way to travel for a self-confessed bibliophile. She kicks off with a trip by Eurostar to Paris with husband Malcolm….

We always take an over-optimistic number of books on holiday.They’re unpacked, lined up on whatever  convenient surface the hotel room affords, marking our temporary territory…then neglected while we read new books bought locally

In the city of light, they pop into L’Arbre du voyageur (rue Mouffetard) and La Hune (in Saint Germain). And then it’s on to the beautiful Collioure, the place that has been admired over many years by artists for its crystal clear light. And then it was back home to start treatment

Her exploration of the written word is not an escape from the terrible side-effects she was having to endure but a leap into life when her own physical existence was reduced to the walls of her home and she contemplates the many benefits copiously recorded throughout history of reading, the art of bibliotherapy.

Through books she had lived in 19th Century Russia, as an emigré in Paris, a repressed woman in Tehran – she had experienced the lives in these places through the eyes of an author. How she ‘visited’ Istanbul with her travelling companion – Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, set in Constantinople as the city was then, a place of barbarity and beauty and feeling that she had truly been there have read the works of Orhan Pamuk.

This short book is like a treatise on the pleasure and value of reading, about how it enables you to travel and to put yourself in the shoes of others, which of course is fundamental to the skill of empathy. She ponders the need to own her own books – perhaps in the words of Alberto Manguel it was ‘a sort of voluptuous greed’ (he wrote The History of Reading). She takes us back in time to when she was a young girl and her enjoyment of books was fostered by those around her. She tries to identify the delight of meeting one’s favourite authors and ponders the burgeoning of literary festivals. The history of libraries, generally positive but less so in Umberto Ecco’s The Name of the Rose.

Awaiting snow (the defamiliarising effect of snow can make us notice life more acutely…) and re-reading the snow descriptions of Jean Cocteau’s “Enfants Terribles” (the author has a skill at reading French books in the original) or that overwhelming snow in Russian books.

Being at heart such a European – and this published in 2014 – she could not have foreseen how on point her discussions with her father would be in 2018, with Brexit dominating everyday lives and all the news.

This is an encylopaedic and fascinating exploration of books and reading, at a time when this author’s life was hanging in the balance.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

Heather and Malcolm run Oxygen Books Love literary travel? You will ove Oxygen Books’ urban travel guides bought to you by the little publisher that takes you on big journeys!

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  1. User: barbara baer

    Posted on: 22/10/2018 at 4:27 pm

    I’d love to read this particularly moving travel account, living strongly in other places with sights, sounds and smells of the world while undergoing some awful assault on one’s body. How do you find this book written during the author’s treatments?

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