here's the very funny first paragraph from human voices, which is my book of the week:

Inside Broadcasting House, the Department of Recorded Programmes was sometimes called the Seraglio, because its Director found that he could work better when surrounded by young women. This in itself was an understandable habit and quite harmless, or, to be more accurate, RPD never considered whether it was harmless or not. If he was to think about such things, his attention had to be specially drawn to them. Meanwhile it was understood by the girls that he might have an overwhelming need to confide his troubles in one of them, or perhaps all of them, but never in two of them at once, during the three wartime shifts in every twenty-four hours. This, too, might possibly suggest the arrangements of a seraglio, but it would have been quite unfair to deduce, as some of the Old Servants of the Corporation occasionally did, that the RP Junior Temporary Assistants had no other duties. On the contrary, they were in anxious charge of the five thousand recordings in use every week. Those which the Department processed went into the Sound Archives of the war, while the scrap was silent for ever.

i wonder how much of t.s. eliot penelope fitzgerald had in mind when titling her book "human voices". probably nothing, though the connection is easy enough to make. i am the obsessive sort of re-reader who can do the same book over and over again in the same day, same week, and never be tired of it. and for this week human voices is the book in question. owning books has everything to do with the ability to reread, at any time. a girl came to my room once and said, you have a lot of books! have you read all of them? and i had to explain. thos that you've read, she pressed on, why do you keep them? when she's done with a book, she is done. next please. owning books doesn't make sense. but this is hard to explain too. why is it i frequently have to justify myself to people? people who read know what i mean, and those who don't i shall never be able to explain. having lots of books isn't at all a sign of erudition, in the way glasses don't signal intelligence. having lots of books around you is about building hideouts and escape routes. about comfort in the knowledge of their proximity, being able to dive away. what was that anne fadiman quoted from virginia woolf in her introduction, about people who own collections too small to be called libraries and not erudite enough to be critics, just engaged in the private pursuit of reading? this is like this.